Don’t Be Evil?
Vauhini Vara, Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age
Grove Press, 352pp, £16.99, ISBN 9781804710685
reviewed by Helena C. Aeberli
At first glance, the cover of Vauhini Vara’s Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age — a still life from the Dutch Golden Age set on a neutral backdrop, surrounded by critical analysis — bears a striking resemblance to John Berger’s Ways of Seeing. It took me half the book to realise what the cover art was actually mimicking: the interface of ChatGPT, OpenAI’s generative AI chatbot, the subject of Vara’s work and, in some senses, her co-author.
In Ways of Seeing, Berger wrote of the history of image-making as defined by ‘an increasing consciousness of individuality, accompanying an increasing awareness of history’. When ChatGPT was released in late 2022, alongside the image generator DALL-E, and an avalanche of AI-generated content hit social media, Berger’s twin developments seemed to have collapsed in on themselves. What was individuality when anyone could enter a command into their browser and conjure up whatever piece of writing or imagery they desired, whether for a specific purpose such as a cover letter or school essay, or simply ‘in the style of’ a notable approach? And what was history when this free-floating, contextless content could be generated on a whim, released from the effort of human labour and the grounding force of what Walter Benjamin famously termed the ‘aura’ of a work of art? Within two months of its public release, ChatGPT had become the fastest growing consumer application ever. Whatever it was doing, it was here to stay.
In Searches, Vara has set out to explore the impact of technological capitalism on every facet of human existence, from how we make art to how we shop, to the ways in which we express our deepest, darkest desires. Born of the genuine, deep-rooted human desire for understanding and connection, tech companies have both fulfilled and exploited us, providing us with technologies we can no longer live without while leeching parasitically from the data we produce. Our desires have shaped these technologies, but they have shaped us in return, by transforming our personal information into a product to be sold at a profit and by feeding us algorithmically personalised content which is often advertising in disguise. ChatGPT is only the latest in a long line of tools which promise to make our lives easier and more entertaining, regardless of the cost. We have normalised and internalised the expectation that the world lies at our fingertips, that fulfilment is only one click away. But is this really what fulfilment looks like?
Vara, a tech reporter and novelist, has a longstanding relationship with the world of Big Tech, as well as stakes in the game. In 2021, she asked an early version of ChatGPT to help her write about her sister’s death, an attempt to find the words she couldn’t. The resulting essay, ‘Ghosts’, went unexpectedly viral. A revised version of ‘Ghosts’, and Vara’s reflections on it four years on, lies at the heart of Searches.
It’s perhaps unsurprising that Vara reached to a new technology to express the inexpressible. Born at the dawn of the millennial generation, she grew up alongside the internet. Of her first encounters with the AOL chatrooms of the early 1990s, she recalls feeling ‘utterly enchanted’ by the invention which would go on to transform her life, and the whole of human life as it had existed up to that point. This included the physical landscapes of the offline world; Vara’s teenage hometown Seattle became unrecognisable under the influence of Amazon and Microsoft, both headquartered in the city. The story of Seattle's development, as well as that of Silicon Valley, serves as a reminder that the assumed separation between on and offline words, what theorist Nathan Jurgenson termed ‘digital dualism’, is a fallacy, a fantasy of a time when ‘in real life’ meant something tangibly distinct from the world of the screen. Or as Vara puts it, musing on the cheap, mass-produced products she buys on Amazon, products which go on to set trends and monopolise the market, pushing out smaller, artisan goods: ‘This is how the material world quietly becomes shaped by algorithm.’ In the face of this seemingly innocent yet insidious creep, the internet’s initial allure has been dwarfed by a growing unease at the size and scale of the companies controlling it, and their undue influence over our lives. ‘Don’t Be Evil’, Google’s former motto, now seems less an earnest expression of techno-utopianism than an ironic piece of dystopian doublespeak foreshadowing the ‘corporate capture of human existence’.
Early chapters of Searches, chronicling the rise of Silicon Valley and its tech barons, retread familiar ground, drawing heavily on Shoshana Zuboff’s theory of ‘surveillance capitalism’. Later chapters focus on AI. By placing AI in a longer narrative of technological capitalism, a troubling pattern begins to emerge. First a new technology is resisted, then — in the face of corporate pressure and appeals to utility and pleasure — it is accepted and accelerated. Vara returns again and again to how quickly we move on and accept the creeping encroachment of Big Tech into our lives. As early as 2006, when Facebook introduced its trademark News Feed feature, people panicked. This felt like stalking, and, as Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged, ‘stalking isn’t cool’. But within weeks ‘people got used to the intrusion that had seemed so horrific and moved on’. The pattern would repeat a decade later following the Cambridge Analytica privacy scandal and revelations about Facebook’s complicity in Trump’s election. The company’s value dropped by $110 billion. But then, Vara writes, almost incredulously, ‘it recovered’, and ‘kept recovering, even after Facebook faced scandal after scandal’. The benefits of Facebook, it seems, outweighed the costs, even if those costs included the nonconsensual sale of users’ data for use in election interference.
These trade-offs have consequences. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman once termed AI an apocalyptic threat to humanity. Now, in no small part thanks to his company’s lobbying, it has become an accepted part of our quotidian realities, one which is virtually inescapable whether you like it or not. Last year, Google introduced its AI Overview feature. Now the first result you see when you search, the feature has been criticised for its inaccuracy, biases, and poorly credited scraping of human-generated content; its result for ‘what is AI’ includes a list of key concepts and uses, but no critical evaluations or risks. One early search result summary apparently advised people to top their pizza with glue. As Vara notes, what distinguishes this ‘productization of AI’ is not its efficacy, but ‘the speed with which corporations had insinuated it into our lives despite its frightening unimpressiveness’. Part of this rapid insinuation is born of a need to improve AI, to find further markets and maximise profits. Existing large language models have been trained by scraping our online output, regardless of our consent; future models are being trained on user interactions with open access AI, although Chat-GPT does now provide an ‘opt out of training’ option. Like many recently published books, the copyright page for Searches includes a disclaimer that ‘no part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner for the purpose of training artificial intelligence’. But OpenAI has been lobbying publishers to provide databases of human-generated works for training purposes. Vara’s former employer, the Wall Street Journal, which is owned by NewsCorp, signed such a deal with OpenAI in 2024, while making major layoffs. How long until others cave?
Despite her anxieties, Vara’s experiments with various digital tools pepper the book, revealing how she has learnt from the internet, and it from her. Some of these gimmicks work better than others. ‘Searches’ presents a chronological archive of the author’s Google Searches between 2010 and 2019. It’s interesting to consider this ‘porthole into the depths of human desire’, but less so to read five pages verbatim. Later, ‘I Am Hungry To Talk’ provides a thought-provoking meditation on communication barriers, mistranslation, and language as what both connects and divides us, written in Vara’s intermediate-level Spanish and then Google Translated. ‘Perhaps it is better to do what is more difficult,’ it concludes, encapsulating the thesis of Searches. ‘To improve our communication using the free tool we already have, which is language.’
I was left similarly divided on the ‘conversations’ with ChatGPT which appear at the end of every few chapters. After completing her manuscript, Vara fed it to the chatbot and asked for summaries and questions (she elected to ‘opt out’ of training the AI). These interludes are strongest when they push against their own limitations, as Vara challenges her interlocutor to acknowledge its own biases and shortcomings, to recognise itself as machine. Tellingly, when she asks ChatGPT to provide her with a list of female or nonbinary artists of colour working with AI, the chatbot fails to fulfil her command, instead providing false or distorted information. It’s a striking demonstration of how AI reproduces existing biases, as well as a reminder of exactly who has proved its primary beneficiaries.
Writing about AI is difficult, given the whiplash pace of change. You think you have a grasp of the field, and the next day your entire X feed is ‘in the style of Studio Ghibli’, with the IDF and White House sending out dystopian images rendered in Technicolor whimsy, despite studio creator Hayao Miyazaki’s vehement opposition to AI, and the neofascist politics it is here being used to promote (in 2016, Miyazaki called AI ‘an insult to life itself’). Sometimes, this leaves Searches feeling dated at publication. A series of images generated using Dall-E 3 in July 2024 already feel outmoded, with their uncanny bodies and disturbing distortions of perspective. There’s an easy gotcha here: look, AI art is bad, so AI is bad! Vara, drawing on her experience writing ‘Ghosts’, resists it. AI art can be good. ‘Ghosts’ helped her express her grief. It touched something in her, and in other people, even as it fed her falsehoods and failed to satisfy her need for closure. The Ghiblified cartoons currently populating social media do have something of the original’s whimsical style, if none of their liveliness or emotional depth. If you squint, they are ‘good’. But is this ‘goodness’ — whatever that means — really enough to make AI-generated content, well, good? Or is that in fact entirely beside the point?
Searches concludes not with an AI postscript, but with a survey. ‘What Is It Like To Be Alive?’ asked hundreds of women to respond to a series of questions about their feelings, family histories, and dreams of a better world. Some answers were glib, others profound. Sometimes, respondents didn’t even want to answer the questions. Reading it, I was surprised to find myself crying. ‘Ghosts’ had made poignant reading, but ‘What Is It Like To Be Alive?’ provided something AI never could: time, effort, energy, and emotion. Hundreds of strange and subjective human experiences which could never be reduced to a single, simple summary. Vara has issued a provocative challenge to her reader, and posed an ethical puzzle with no easy answer. Admirably candid and fiercely observant, Searches — despite its AI interludes — is unabashedly human.
In Ways of Seeing, Berger wrote of the history of image-making as defined by ‘an increasing consciousness of individuality, accompanying an increasing awareness of history’. When ChatGPT was released in late 2022, alongside the image generator DALL-E, and an avalanche of AI-generated content hit social media, Berger’s twin developments seemed to have collapsed in on themselves. What was individuality when anyone could enter a command into their browser and conjure up whatever piece of writing or imagery they desired, whether for a specific purpose such as a cover letter or school essay, or simply ‘in the style of’ a notable approach? And what was history when this free-floating, contextless content could be generated on a whim, released from the effort of human labour and the grounding force of what Walter Benjamin famously termed the ‘aura’ of a work of art? Within two months of its public release, ChatGPT had become the fastest growing consumer application ever. Whatever it was doing, it was here to stay.
In Searches, Vara has set out to explore the impact of technological capitalism on every facet of human existence, from how we make art to how we shop, to the ways in which we express our deepest, darkest desires. Born of the genuine, deep-rooted human desire for understanding and connection, tech companies have both fulfilled and exploited us, providing us with technologies we can no longer live without while leeching parasitically from the data we produce. Our desires have shaped these technologies, but they have shaped us in return, by transforming our personal information into a product to be sold at a profit and by feeding us algorithmically personalised content which is often advertising in disguise. ChatGPT is only the latest in a long line of tools which promise to make our lives easier and more entertaining, regardless of the cost. We have normalised and internalised the expectation that the world lies at our fingertips, that fulfilment is only one click away. But is this really what fulfilment looks like?
Vara, a tech reporter and novelist, has a longstanding relationship with the world of Big Tech, as well as stakes in the game. In 2021, she asked an early version of ChatGPT to help her write about her sister’s death, an attempt to find the words she couldn’t. The resulting essay, ‘Ghosts’, went unexpectedly viral. A revised version of ‘Ghosts’, and Vara’s reflections on it four years on, lies at the heart of Searches.
It’s perhaps unsurprising that Vara reached to a new technology to express the inexpressible. Born at the dawn of the millennial generation, she grew up alongside the internet. Of her first encounters with the AOL chatrooms of the early 1990s, she recalls feeling ‘utterly enchanted’ by the invention which would go on to transform her life, and the whole of human life as it had existed up to that point. This included the physical landscapes of the offline world; Vara’s teenage hometown Seattle became unrecognisable under the influence of Amazon and Microsoft, both headquartered in the city. The story of Seattle's development, as well as that of Silicon Valley, serves as a reminder that the assumed separation between on and offline words, what theorist Nathan Jurgenson termed ‘digital dualism’, is a fallacy, a fantasy of a time when ‘in real life’ meant something tangibly distinct from the world of the screen. Or as Vara puts it, musing on the cheap, mass-produced products she buys on Amazon, products which go on to set trends and monopolise the market, pushing out smaller, artisan goods: ‘This is how the material world quietly becomes shaped by algorithm.’ In the face of this seemingly innocent yet insidious creep, the internet’s initial allure has been dwarfed by a growing unease at the size and scale of the companies controlling it, and their undue influence over our lives. ‘Don’t Be Evil’, Google’s former motto, now seems less an earnest expression of techno-utopianism than an ironic piece of dystopian doublespeak foreshadowing the ‘corporate capture of human existence’.
Early chapters of Searches, chronicling the rise of Silicon Valley and its tech barons, retread familiar ground, drawing heavily on Shoshana Zuboff’s theory of ‘surveillance capitalism’. Later chapters focus on AI. By placing AI in a longer narrative of technological capitalism, a troubling pattern begins to emerge. First a new technology is resisted, then — in the face of corporate pressure and appeals to utility and pleasure — it is accepted and accelerated. Vara returns again and again to how quickly we move on and accept the creeping encroachment of Big Tech into our lives. As early as 2006, when Facebook introduced its trademark News Feed feature, people panicked. This felt like stalking, and, as Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged, ‘stalking isn’t cool’. But within weeks ‘people got used to the intrusion that had seemed so horrific and moved on’. The pattern would repeat a decade later following the Cambridge Analytica privacy scandal and revelations about Facebook’s complicity in Trump’s election. The company’s value dropped by $110 billion. But then, Vara writes, almost incredulously, ‘it recovered’, and ‘kept recovering, even after Facebook faced scandal after scandal’. The benefits of Facebook, it seems, outweighed the costs, even if those costs included the nonconsensual sale of users’ data for use in election interference.
These trade-offs have consequences. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman once termed AI an apocalyptic threat to humanity. Now, in no small part thanks to his company’s lobbying, it has become an accepted part of our quotidian realities, one which is virtually inescapable whether you like it or not. Last year, Google introduced its AI Overview feature. Now the first result you see when you search, the feature has been criticised for its inaccuracy, biases, and poorly credited scraping of human-generated content; its result for ‘what is AI’ includes a list of key concepts and uses, but no critical evaluations or risks. One early search result summary apparently advised people to top their pizza with glue. As Vara notes, what distinguishes this ‘productization of AI’ is not its efficacy, but ‘the speed with which corporations had insinuated it into our lives despite its frightening unimpressiveness’. Part of this rapid insinuation is born of a need to improve AI, to find further markets and maximise profits. Existing large language models have been trained by scraping our online output, regardless of our consent; future models are being trained on user interactions with open access AI, although Chat-GPT does now provide an ‘opt out of training’ option. Like many recently published books, the copyright page for Searches includes a disclaimer that ‘no part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner for the purpose of training artificial intelligence’. But OpenAI has been lobbying publishers to provide databases of human-generated works for training purposes. Vara’s former employer, the Wall Street Journal, which is owned by NewsCorp, signed such a deal with OpenAI in 2024, while making major layoffs. How long until others cave?
Despite her anxieties, Vara’s experiments with various digital tools pepper the book, revealing how she has learnt from the internet, and it from her. Some of these gimmicks work better than others. ‘Searches’ presents a chronological archive of the author’s Google Searches between 2010 and 2019. It’s interesting to consider this ‘porthole into the depths of human desire’, but less so to read five pages verbatim. Later, ‘I Am Hungry To Talk’ provides a thought-provoking meditation on communication barriers, mistranslation, and language as what both connects and divides us, written in Vara’s intermediate-level Spanish and then Google Translated. ‘Perhaps it is better to do what is more difficult,’ it concludes, encapsulating the thesis of Searches. ‘To improve our communication using the free tool we already have, which is language.’
I was left similarly divided on the ‘conversations’ with ChatGPT which appear at the end of every few chapters. After completing her manuscript, Vara fed it to the chatbot and asked for summaries and questions (she elected to ‘opt out’ of training the AI). These interludes are strongest when they push against their own limitations, as Vara challenges her interlocutor to acknowledge its own biases and shortcomings, to recognise itself as machine. Tellingly, when she asks ChatGPT to provide her with a list of female or nonbinary artists of colour working with AI, the chatbot fails to fulfil her command, instead providing false or distorted information. It’s a striking demonstration of how AI reproduces existing biases, as well as a reminder of exactly who has proved its primary beneficiaries.
Writing about AI is difficult, given the whiplash pace of change. You think you have a grasp of the field, and the next day your entire X feed is ‘in the style of Studio Ghibli’, with the IDF and White House sending out dystopian images rendered in Technicolor whimsy, despite studio creator Hayao Miyazaki’s vehement opposition to AI, and the neofascist politics it is here being used to promote (in 2016, Miyazaki called AI ‘an insult to life itself’). Sometimes, this leaves Searches feeling dated at publication. A series of images generated using Dall-E 3 in July 2024 already feel outmoded, with their uncanny bodies and disturbing distortions of perspective. There’s an easy gotcha here: look, AI art is bad, so AI is bad! Vara, drawing on her experience writing ‘Ghosts’, resists it. AI art can be good. ‘Ghosts’ helped her express her grief. It touched something in her, and in other people, even as it fed her falsehoods and failed to satisfy her need for closure. The Ghiblified cartoons currently populating social media do have something of the original’s whimsical style, if none of their liveliness or emotional depth. If you squint, they are ‘good’. But is this ‘goodness’ — whatever that means — really enough to make AI-generated content, well, good? Or is that in fact entirely beside the point?
Searches concludes not with an AI postscript, but with a survey. ‘What Is It Like To Be Alive?’ asked hundreds of women to respond to a series of questions about their feelings, family histories, and dreams of a better world. Some answers were glib, others profound. Sometimes, respondents didn’t even want to answer the questions. Reading it, I was surprised to find myself crying. ‘Ghosts’ had made poignant reading, but ‘What Is It Like To Be Alive?’ provided something AI never could: time, effort, energy, and emotion. Hundreds of strange and subjective human experiences which could never be reduced to a single, simple summary. Vara has issued a provocative challenge to her reader, and posed an ethical puzzle with no easy answer. Admirably candid and fiercely observant, Searches — despite its AI interludes — is unabashedly human.