From the author of The Immortal King Rao finalist for the Pulitzer Prize a personal and
provocative exploration of how technology companies have reshaped human language and if we
let them could steal it from us When it was released to the public in November 2022 ChatGPT
awakened the world to a secretive project: teaching A.I.-powered machines to write and talk
like human beings. Its creators had a sweeping ambition—to get machines to communicate for us.
But if this came to pass would it be liberation or subjugation? Vauhini Vara an
award-winning tech journalist and editor had long been grappling with this question. In 2021
she used a predecessor of ChatGPT to write about her sister’s death resulting in an essay that
was both more moving and more disturbing than she could have imagined. It quickly went viral.
The experience revealing both the appeal and the danger of corporate-owned language machines
forced Vara to interrogate how technology has changed how she uses language from discovering
online chat rooms as a preteen to using social media as the Wall Street Journal’ s first
Facebook reporter to testing early versions of ChatGPT—all while adding to the trove of
human-created material that Big Tech exploits. Interspersed throughout this investigation are
her own Google searches Amazon reviews and the other raw material of internet life—including
the viral A.I. experiment that started it all. Searches illuminates Big Tech’s incursion into
our lives while proposing that by harnessing the collective imagination that taught us to
communicate in the first place we might invent a nobler freer relationship with our machines
and ultimately with one another.
