Portrait of ChatGPT as a Young Artist: Vauhini Vara on Voice, Tech, and Using AI in Writing

At Literary Hub, Sarah Viren is in conversation with Vauhini Vara about her new book of nonfiction, Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age. You might remember Vara as the author of “Ghosts,” a 2021 Believer piece in which she starts a conversation with ChatGPT-3 as part of processing the death of her sister. Vara also has a novel and a short story collection to her credit. Here, Vara discusses the experimental nature of her writing, how readers and writers co-create a text, and how being vulnerable can open us up to making connections.

Because my roots as a nonfiction writer are in newspaper journalism—where the presence of the narrator, as a character, tends to be so deliberately subtle as to be almost effaced—I tend to be a bit reluctant to write myself into my nonfiction as a central character, knowing that there are so many people in the world whose stories are much more worthy of telling than mine, by which I mean, the details of what they’ve experienced are interesting and significant, and those experiences speak to some interesting and significant broader story that’s unfolding in the world.

What I ended up realizing with this project, though, is that the story of my evolving relationship with technology—a narrow slice of my experience in life—actually is worthy of telling by the definition that I set for myself. Specifically, I realized both that my early experiences, especially as an early Silicon Valley reporter in the mid-2000s, were legitimately interesting and significant, and that I had an opportunity to sort of use myself as a character that could stand in for all of us in some ways.