To tell her own story, this acclaimed novelist turned to ChatGPT

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Searches:Selfhood in the Digital Age, By Vauhini Vara. Pantheon. 332 pp. $30

It doesn’t take much to gather what Vauhini Vara’s “Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age” is all about. ChatGPT conveniently offers readers a summary on the book’s cover: the hybrid memoir-essay collection, it explains, “could explore how the internet and digital technologies influence and reshape personal identity, self-perception, and the quest for meaning in contemporary society.” There is an awkward uncertainty in the chatbot’s summary: the book could explore these topics, but that might not be the case.

It is precisely ChatGPT’s equivocality – and, on occasion, the pure nonsense it spawns – that undergirds “Searches.” Across 16 chapters, Vara journeys through the evolution of the internet, ethical quandaries surrounding AI, and her own life with her characteristically piercing, yet unadorned prose. In an unusual twist, she occasionally turns the chatbot into her interlocutor, asking it for feedback and at times collaborating in explicit ways as she crafts personal essays. The resulting collection echoes some of the themes explored in Vara’s Pulitzer Prize-finalist debut novel, “The Immortal King Rao” (2022): the evolution of digital technology, the perils of surveillance capitalism, the gripping story of a South Indian immigrant family cementing its place in America. But “Searches” stands on its own, at once genre-defying and gripping.

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For all her interest in the ways that technology mediates our lives, Vara’s experiences growing up in the 1990s as the daughter of Indian immigrants are what make the book most profoundly intimate. She explores her elder sister’s losing battle with cancer, her own unrequited schoolyard crushes, her marriage to a staunch Luddite who ultimately must cave to the digital age, and, she humbly confesses, her attempts at asking the internet “how to be more beautiful.”

Vara’s use of digital tools sometimes takes even more direct forms: In an essay titled “Ghosts,” in which she alternates writing paragraphs with ChatGPT to co-create a poignant reflection on her sister’s death, Vara acknowledges the chatbot’s success in writing “as nuanced and profound a reference to embodiment as I’d ever read.” On occasion, she admits, the AI tool is capable of beautifully encapsulating human grief. The chatbot’s upward trajectory, she argues, suggests that its ability to produce worthy cultural and literary output will only improve over time.

But is it really that ChatGPT is capable of producing original, devastatingly beautiful sentences, or does it simply have enough data in its repository to mimic common stylistic techniques used in creative writing? After all, the sentence in question – “This is the hand she held: the hand I write with, the hand I am writing with,” in reference to Vara’s sister – is a case study in anaphora and tense shift, both common rhetorical devices. Even if, as Vara argues, “GPT-3 had produced the best lines in ‘Ghosts,’” is it fair to call the chatbot’s writing original – let alone profoundly human – or does it simply rival the output of an attentive student in an introductory English composition course?

While Vara fails to ask such questions of ChatGPT, she doesn’t turn a blind eye to the chatbot’s shortcomings, mainly when it comes to race and gender. In the section titled “A Powerful Statement of Empowerment,” after she asks the chatbot to list one important artist from each significant period in visual art history, Vara observes that it instantly generates a list of almost all White, male artists, including da Vinci, Monet and Picasso. Even when she asks for non-White female artists, it erroneously includes two male artists and another who is, Vara finds, entirely fictional. In another piece, Vara mentions that when co-writing “Ghosts” with ChatGPT, it first steered the narrative toward a heterosexual romance before eventually catching on that the essay was, in fact, about familial grief.

Like AI itself, “Searches” is imperfect. It raises ethical questions that remain unanswered even as the author endeavors to explore the paradoxes of her own engagement with AI. And at times, the book slides into tedium and banality, most memorably in the title chapter, “Searches,” which presents a five-page chronological-by-section archive of Vara’s internet searches from 2010 to 2019: “Where are forest fires increasing. Where is cantonese spoken. Where to buy toilet snake,” and so on, an accumulation that feels endless. It’s a wonder that this all-but-unreadable essay, if you can call it one, was first published in the New York Times, where it was punctuated with rotating images from Google Search.

But a glimmer of quixotic hope lingers in “Searches”: the possibility of an internet owned by the people. “Inventions like these … aren’t impossible,” Vara writes of publicly owned search engines and messaging services. “To call a proposed invention impossible is as nonsensical as calling a declaration impossible, or a fiction, or a joke.” She offers examples of successful companies run by nonprofits that spend less than $500 million a year in expenses: Firefox, Wikipedia, Signal. Vara builds on such thoughts to imagine a revolutionary, futuristic universe: “We abolish borders and prisons, we take collective ownership of machines, we find common cause with other species.” It’s unlikely, she confesses. “This,” she writes of that better future, “is a fiction. It’s a declaration. It’s a joke. It’s an invention.” But it’s possible.

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Meena Venkataramanan writes stories on identity, culture and Asian American communities for The Post.

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