Vauhini Vara

Vauhini Vara has been a reporter and editor for The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and the New York Times Magazine. Her debut novel, "The Immortal King Rao" was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, was shortlisted for the National Book Critics’ Circle’s John Leonard Prize and the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize, and it won the Colorado Book Award. Publications that named it a notable book of the year in which it was published include NPR and The New York Times, where it was called “a monumental achievement.” It has been published around the English-speaking world, including in India, where it won the Atta Galatta Bangalore Literature Festival Book Prize and the Times of India AutHer Award. Italian and Korean translations are forthcoming.

When ChatGPT was released to the public in November 2022, it awakened the world to a secretive project: teaching AI-powered machines to write. Its creators had a sweeping ambition—to build machines that could not only communicate, but do all kinds of other activities—better than humans ever could. But was this goal actually achievable? And if reached, would it lead to our liberation or our subjugation?

Vara, an award-winning tech journalist and editor, had long been grappling with these questions, and in 2021, she asked a predecessor of ChatGPT to write about her sister’s death. It resulted in an essay that was both more moving and more disturbing than she could have imagined. And 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 testing early versions of ChatGPT—while compelling her to add to the trove of human-created material exploited for corporations’ 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 imagination that makes humans unique, we might invent a nobler, freer relationship with our machines and, ultimately, with one another.

A book signing will take place in the Ballroom immediately after the session.