Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age

I started the past two years with what I called “optimistic non-fiction reads”; it was kind of a coincidence and I resolved to continue the trend annually. I don’t think that Searches by Vauhini Vara quite fits the bill, but I’ll try to give the most hopeful interpretation I can.

This book was born from “Ghosts”, an article published in The Believer magazine. In it, Vara prompts OpenAI’s GPT-3 with the start of a piece of writing about her sister’s death from cancer. GPT completes the story, using the “knowledge” it has gained from consuming and training on a vast corpus of writing. Then, she repeats the original prompt, adding a few more sentences to her story, and again, GPT attempts to finish the piece. Vara repeats the exercise nine times, and with each iteration, she writes a bit more of her truth. GPT’s completions vary wildly, sometimes giving a happy ending where her sister survives, other times inventing a wistful memory from their childhood, and yet other times spiralling into gibberish.

It’s a powerful piece and worth reading on its own. Expanded into a book, Searches explores the history of the Internet age, and how tech companies take their users’ data to relentlessly drive profit. The biggest asset of companies like Alphabet, Meta and Amazon is what they know about us, and this business model has evolved into the current trend of large language models, whose knowledge consists of basically all text on the Internet.

Despite my love for working with software, my skepticism and distaste towards tech companies’ behaviour has grown in recent years, and my reading choices, despite my efforts to diversify, tends to draw me deeper into my echo chamber.¹ Searches is probably the most artfully written book of its ilk that I’ve read, and it’s the first that explicitly deals with the growth of AI. Vara has a sharp, expressive style that critiques Big Tech without being overly inflammatory.

Throughout the book, she experiments with incorporating the output of AI tools, for example, chats with GPT where she asks it to summarize and evaluate the contents of the previous chapter. This takes a turn towards the absurd when GPT reads her less-than-flattering profile of Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, and it can’t help but defend and aggrandize him.

I was supposed to give a hopeful perspective, so here it is: while the subject matter of Searches makes me worry a lot about what kind of future we’re going to live in, the structure and formal experimentation that Vara deploys evoke a more heartening feeling. By contrasting her nuanced writing about Altman with GPT’s sycophantic platitudes, she’s demonstrating the gap between human and machine. My eyes glazed over whenever there was a long stretch of GPT output in the book, only to lock in again on the sections that she wrote.

I have hope because I can tell the difference.

I have hope that even if and when the gap shrinks, a person’s voice will always be more powerful than an artificial one.