In 2019, journalist Vauhini Vara stumbled upon a rich personal archive she didn’t know she was curating.

“I realized that Google was tracking all of my search results from the beginning of time—or at least the beginning of when it was able to do this,” Vara says in a video call from her Colorado home. “I became curious about what Google knew about me.”

Vara’s search history, which included queries ranging from “what is the top of a blueberry called” to “how to soften dried krazy glue” and “what should a person be,” inspired the title essay of her new Kirkus-starred collection, Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age (Pantheon, April 8). Although she published this list of queries in the opinion section of the New York Times in 2019—and saw that readers had an appetite for inventive pieces about technology—it wasn’t until she published the essay “Ghosts” in Believer magazinethat she realized she might have a collection on her hands.

“I started wondering if there might be something to write made up entirely of these experimental tech-related essays,” Vara says. “I started writing them one by one as they came to me, out of personal curiosity and interest.”

In “Ghosts,” Vara recounts how she provided an artificial intelligence model with a series of memories about her older sister’s untimely death, hoping the program would help her articulate her unresolved feelings about the decades-old family tragedy. Vara says that she didn’t set out to write the piece; its formation took her by surprise.

“I don’t know that I would have been able to write that essay if I’d said to myself, And now I shall write an essay that I’ll publish in a periodical,” Vara says.

The author of the novel The Immortal King Rao and of the Kirkus-starred story collection This Is Salvaged, Vara began her career as a business journalist for outlets such as the Wall Street Journal, the New Yorker, Bloomberg Businessweek,and Wired. She began writing “Ghosts” after profiling Sam Altman in 2017, just before he became the CEO of OpenAI. The reporting process inspired Vara to ask for access to an AI model that would go on to power ChatGPT. Although Vara only intended to use the model for experimentation—at one point, she repeatedly fed it the first line of Moby-Dick “just to see what happened”—eventually she found herself asking the program about her sister’s passing.

“It came out of a desire for help expressing something I didn’t know how to express,” Vara says. “Ultimately—at least in my experience; other people might read the essay differently—it turns out this technology is not able to provide what I was looking for, because no technology is able to speak from my perspective.”

This epiphany aligns with others in Searches, which Vara says she wrote as an investigation of “how big technology companies both fulfill and exploit our human desires and needs.” A chapter entitled “Resurrections” challenges visual AI to create a record of undocumented moments in Vara’s personal and family history. The essay “A Great Deal” is a collection of Vara’s Amazon reviews of personal purchases ranging from fig bars to chewable lactase to crew socks. The piece “Elon Musk, Empire” is a catalog of the author’s interests generated by the social media platform X based on her posts and interactions—among them Beyoncé, Russian political figures, horror books, and agriculture. Each chapter employs innovative structures that Vara’s editor appreciated but initially found incomplete.

“My editor said, ‘I know that you understand what you’re doing here. But a reader might need more background,’” Vara explains. “She suggested writing an introduction and conclusion, but I got it into my head to revamp the whole book. That’s why I added the chapters that are memoiristic and journalistic.”

In these additional essays, the author examines her history as the daughter of Indian immigrants and as the mother of a young boy. Vara says the inclusion of stories about parenting flowed naturally from the book’s themes.

“Having a child makes my thinking about the world 10, 20, or 50 years from now so much more concrete. Because there’s this individual human who I care so much about who’s going to be in that world. That’s part of it, certainly,” Vara says. “Also, being a parent is just so bound up in human desire, as well as the human need for connection, to care and to be cared for, which intersects with what tech companies are doing in interesting ways.”

Vara’s editor had another, less traditional suggestion: plugging excerpts of the work in progress into ChatGPT to see how it responded.      

“My initial reaction was, ‘That’s a horrible idea!’” Vara says, laughing. Eventually, though, the author’s curiosity won out, and she decided to try it. The result is a series of conversations between the author and an AI program, which she interweaves throughout the book.

Vara’s openness to experimenting with AI contrasts with the creative writing community’s widespread avoidance of large language models as well as the anxiety many artists feel about this new technology. The 2023 Hollywood writers’ strike, for instance, began partly as a result of studios threatening to replace screenwriters with AI. The Author’s Guild recently developed a policy platform stating that “it is inherently unfair to use and incorporate books, articles, and other copyrighted works in the fabric of AI technologies without the author’s consent, compensation, or credit.” Publications like I Am Code, an AI-generated book of poems credited to code-davinci-002, further fuel fears that creative writers will soon find themselves obsolete.

Vara believes that readers, rather than writers, will determine the publishing industry’s future relationship with AI.

“It’s an open question whether or not people are interested in reading something that doesn’t originate from a human consciousness,” she says. “Readers are the customers, and if customers don’t want this product that’s being sold, then the product isn’t going to be successful.”

Vara continues, “It’s easy for us to think about big tech’s role in our life in a binary way. Oftentimes we say, ‘These companies are exploiting us.’ Then the companies say—I think fairly reasonably—‘You're making a choice to use our products. You could decide not to use them.’ During the writing process, I discovered that this tension is what Searches is about: If we’re going to talk about the ways in which these companies exploit us, we need to also contend with the more difficult part of the equation, which is that we are using these products of our own volition.”

Moreover, Vara points out that all technology—including AI—is, inherently, a site of possibility.

“Humans are endlessly creative, and we can find creative uses of anything,” she says. “I would argue that Google search results are a potential source of creativity, or Amazon reviews, the same way the trash one finds on the sidewalk could become found art, or a government document could become an erasure poem. Literally anything can spark creativity.”

Mathangi Subramanian is a novelist, an essayist, and the founder of Moon Rabbit Writing Studio.