From the author of The Immortal King Rao finalist for the Pulitzer Prize a personal
exploration of how technology companies have both fulfilled and exploited the human desire for
understanding and connection A Most Anticipated Book from The New York Times and more! • One
of Esquire’s Best Books of the Year (So Far) • One of Vanity Fair 's Best Books to Kick Off
Your Summer Reading • A Belletrist Book Club Pick "I cannot imagine a better guide through
the infuriating labyrinthine underworld of technology than Vauhini Vara."—Carmen Maria Machado
author of In the Dream House “Smart funny honest.”— The New Yorker • "Seamless blend of
personal narrative and systemic critique." —The Atlantic • "Beautifully written and profoundly
researched." —Kirkus • "At once genre-defying and gripping.”— The Washington Post When it was
released to the public in November 2022 ChatGPT awakened the world to a secretive project:
teaching AI-powered machines to write. Its creators had a sweeping ambition—to build machines
that not only could communicate but also could do all kinds of other activities and better
than humans ever could. But was this goal actually achievable? And if reached would it lead to
our liberation or our subjugation? Vauhini Vara an award-winning tech journalist and editor
had long been grappling with these questions. In 2021 she asked 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 power and the danger of corporate-owned technologies forced Vara to interrogate how these
technologies have influenced her understanding of herself and the world around her—from
discovering online chat rooms as a preteen to using social media as The Wall Street Journal’ s
first Facebook reporter to asking ChatGPT for writing advice—while compelling her to add to the
trove of human-created material exploited for corporate financial gain. Interspersed throughout
this investigation are her own Google searches Amazon reviews and the other raw material of
internet life—including the viral AI experiment that started it all. Searches illuminates how
technological capitalism is both shaping and exploiting human existence while proposing that by
harnessing the collective creativity that makes humans unique we might imagine a freer more
empowered relationship with our machines and ultimately with one another.
