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Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age
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94/99
Volume
24/99
Rating
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About This Book
From the author of The Immortal King Rao, finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, a personal and provocative exploration of how technology companies have reshaped human language, and, if we let them, could steal it from usWhen it was released to the public in November 2022, ChatGPT awakened the world to a secretive teaching A.I.-powered machines to write and talk like human beings. Its creators had a sweeping ambition—to get machines to communicate for us. But if this came to pass, would it be liberation or subjugation? Vauhini Vara, an award-winning tech journalist and editor, had long been grappling with this question. In 2021, she used a predecessor of ChatGPT to write about her sister's death, resulting in an essay that was both more moving and more disturbing than she could have imagined. It quickly went viral.The experience, revealing both the appeal and the danger of corporate-owned language machines, forced Vara to interrogate how technology has changed how she uses language, 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—all while adding to the trove of human-created material that Big Tech exploits. Interspersed throughout this investigation are her own Google searches, Amazon reviews, and the other raw material of internet life—including the viral A.I. experiment that started it all. Searches illuminates Big Tech's incursion into our lives, while proposing that by harnessing the collective imagination that taught us to communicate in the first place, we might invent a nobler, freer relationship with our machines and, ultimately, with one another.
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Reviews
"Readers will be profoundly moved by this remarkable meditation."
"It's also a clear reminder that, at least for now, nothing can make language sing like a gifted human mind."
"The answers [to Vara's survey] are so breathtakingly rich, the details so specific and arresting, that they highlight the blandness of ChatGPT's replies."
"This book is by turns absurd and insightful, engaging with the ethics of algorithms, surveillance, and privacy in a meaningful way ..."
"Provocative, challenging, and concerning, Vara's clever, eye-opening approach brings home the often-uneasy confluence of individual desire, social benefits, and corporate ambition."
"Her use of experimental forms, like listing a brief history of her Google searches and creating an annotated essay about her recent Amazon purchases, pushes the limits of the genre without ever compromising her circumspective, confessional approach ..."
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