Searches

A personal and provocative exploration of how technology companies have reshaped human language, and, if we let them, could steal it from us.

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When it was released to the public in 2022, ChatGPT awakened the world to a secretive project: 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, has long been interrogating 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 A.I. exploits. 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.