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This is fresh air. I'm Terry Gross. Here's the kind of conflicted relationship my guest has with

big tech. Tech journalist and award-winning novelist Wahini Vara has ethical reasons why she

shouldn't shop on Amazon, and at least as many reasons why she does. Then there's Google. She's

opposed to how Google monetizes our personal information to sell

ads geared to our interests, but she appreciates the archive of her own stored searches,

many of which she lists in her book because of what they reveal about different periods of her life.

As a tech reporter, she got access to a predecessor of ChatGBT.GT. She loves playing

with AI and has found ways it can be helpful. But she's skeptical of its use as an aid for writers.

She's written twice about testing a chatbot in that capacity, first in an essay that went

viral called Ghosts, in which she asked

AI to help her write about her sister's death. And now again, in Varra's new book, Searches,

Selfhood in the Digital Age. After she wrote chapters of the book, she fed the chapters to chat

GPT and asked for help with her writing. Then she analyzed the advice

and what it says about the abilities, shortcomings, and biases of the chatbot. She added her

interactions with chat GPT to her book. The theme of the book is how tech is helping and exploiting

us.

Vara started as a reporter at the Stanford University campus paper,

where she edited its first article about Facebook when Stanford became the third university to get access to it.

She covered tech for the Wall Street Journal,

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