Vauhini Vara’s Examines Selfhood with Assistance from ChatGPT

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KQED

Politics, News, News Commentary

4.6 • 656 Ratings

🗓️ 15 April 2025

⏱️ 57 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

When tech writer Vauhini Vara was struggling to process her sister’s death in 2021, she asked an early version of ChatGPT to write about it through an increasingly complex series of prompts. The essays in her collection, “Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age” build on her conversations with AI, enlisting its help to grapple with what it means to be human when our thoughts, our words — and with them, our very humanity — are filtered through machines. We talk to Vara about how technological capitalism is redefining what it means to be human. Guests: Vauhini Vara, tech journalist and novelist; her new collection of essays is “Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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1:29.8	When technology reporter and novelist Wahanivro was struggling to process her sister's death, she did not turn to her therapist mom or editor friends. She asked
1:36.0	chat GPT for help. In her latest book, Searches, Selfhood in the Digital Age, Vara enlists
1:42.6	AI to grapple with what it means to be human, and she critiques
1:46.7	how technological capitalism is conquering the human mind.
1:51.0	We talk with Vara about her love-hate relationship with generative AI.
1:55.5	That's all next after this news. News. Welcome to Forum. I'm Arthy Shahani, in for Alexis Madrigal.
2:16.2	ChatGPT has half a billion active users a week,
2:19.9	according to OpenAI, which owns the artificial intelligence platform. On today's show,
2:24.5	we have one of its most notable users, an accomplished writer whose goal is not to get work done
	...

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