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“But AI language models, being mere parrots, do not have communicative intent. They neither represent an individual perspective nor model the perspective of a potential reader. They language they emit is all signifier, stripped of significance; any significance we perceive is a mirage. In the line of 'Ghosts' in which my sister holds my hand, it might seem, at first glance, that GPT-3 is conjuring my perspective. But there's a problem with that interpretation--because what it described never happened. I don't remember any moment when we were driving home from Clarke Beach and my sister took my hand. And it's not just that. The truth is that I can't even easily imagine something like it; my sister and I were never so sentimental. Maybe that's why I found myself so attracted ot the line. it was a kind of wish fulfillment. Yet it wasn't true, which is the reason that, with each iteration, I kept deleting GPT-3's words and replacing them with mind. The machine-generated falsehoods compelled me to assert my own consciousness by writing against the falsehoods.

In 'Ghosts,' I diminished GPT-3's role over the course of the nine attempts, writing a growing proportion of the text myself. In the version of the essay published in The Believer, I gave GPT-3 the last lines. In the final paragraph, I wrote, 'Once upon a time, my sister taught me to read. She taught me to wait for a mosquito to swell on my arm and then slap it and see the blood spurt out. She taught me to insult racists back. To swim. To pronounce English so I sounded less Indian. To shave my legs without cutting myself. To lie to our parents believably.' GPT-3 continued, 'To do math. To tell stories. Once upon a time, she taught me to exist.' But after its publication and subsequent reception, I decided to revise the piece, reclaiming the last lines for myself. The revised version is the one in these pages. I wanted to make sure it came across that the essay is as much about what technological promises us as it is about the perversion, and ultimate betrayal, of that promise. GPT-3 couldn't satisfy me as a writer. That was, for me, the point.”
― Vauhini Vara, Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age

“But AI language models, being mere parrots, do not have communicative intent. They neither represent an individual perspective nor model the perspective of a potential reader. They language they emit is all signifier, stripped of significance; any significance we perceive is a mirage. In the line of 'Ghosts' in which my sister holds my hand, it might seem, at first glance, that GPT-3 is conjuring my perspective. But there's a problem with that interpretation--because what it described never happened. I don't remember any moment when we were driving home from Clarke Beach and my sister took my hand. And it's not just that. The trust is that I can't even easily imagine something like it; my sister and I were never so sentimental. Maybe that's why I found myself so attracted ot the line. it was a kind of wish fulfillment. Yet it wasn't true, which is the reason that, with each iteration, I kept deleting GPT-3's words and replacing them with mind. The machine-generated falsehoods compelled me to assert my own consciousness by writing against the falsehoods.

In 'Ghosts,' I diminished GPT-3's role over the course of the nine attempts, writing a growing proportion of the text myself. In the version of the essay published in The Believer, I gave GPT-3 the last lines. In the final paragraph, I wrote, 'Once upon a time, my sister taught me to read. She taught me to wait for a mosquito to swell on my arm and then slap it and see the blood spurt out. She taught me to insult racists back. To swim. To pronounce English so I sounded less Indian. To shave my legs without cutting myself. To lie to our parents believably.' GPT-3 continued, 'To do math. To tell stories. Once upon a time, she taught me to exist.' But after its publication and subsequent reception, I decided to revise the piece, reclaiming the last lines for myself. The revised version is the one in these pages. I wanted to make sure it came across that the essay is as much about what technological promises us as it is about the perversion, and ultimate betrayal, of that promise. GPT-3 couldn't satisfy me as a writer. That was, for me, the point.”
― Vauhini Vara, Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age

“Is it even possible to subvert the tools of technological capitalism to create art from the raw material of my life? Is it possible to use them to cast light on the exploitation they facilitate and our complicity in it? Or are these exercises inherently corrupted by their reliance on the tools? I wonder how Audre Lorde would answer. It's true that the title of her famous essay would seem to contain her response. But then, it's also true that she delivered her critique of the rhetorical tools of academics at an academic conferences. What I do know about Lorde is that she had little patience for guilt, on its own, unless it led to action, preferably communal action. Maybe if I could ask her about all this, she would urge me to look beyond the walls of my own limited selfhood for perspective--to look outward, not inward.

In contemplating how to end this book, I will consider that. I will dwell on Silicon's Valley's promise to make machines that seem alive, and this will make me think about being alive feels like to me. I will attempt to define it, even as my consciousness doubles and redoubles inside me.”
― Vauhini Vara, Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age

“In his article, Lewis-Kraus described attending the London launch of Google Translate, at which a slide behind Sundar Pichai, Google’s CEO, showed a quotation attributed to Jorge Luis Borges: “Uno no es lo que es por lo que escribe, sino por lo que ha leído.” Pichai read aloud an awkward English translation from the old version of Google Translate—“One is not what is for what he writes, but for what he has read”—to the right of which was “a new A.I.-rendered version”: “You are not what you write, but what you have read.” Lewis-Kraus noted, “It was a fitting remark: The new Google Translate was run on the first machines that had, in a sense, ever learned to read anything at all.” By the time I heard about OpenAI’s experiments with large language models, I had begun wondering if Google’s AI model had really learned to read—that is, in the sense in which humans learn to read, by associating language with meaning. Recently, when I looked up the Borges quotation cited by Pichai, I couldn’t find it anywhere in his work. I wrote to the University of Pittsburgh’s Borges Center for help tracking it down, and its director, Daniel Balderston, said he also wasn’t sure of the source, though he noted that it came close to a line from a Borges poem: “Que otros se jacten de las páginas que han escrito; / a mi me enorgullecen las que he leído.” “Let others boast about the pages they have written; / I am proud of the ones I have read.”
― Vauhini Vara, Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age

“Amazon’s business uses natural resources, too. Its annual carbon emissions have grown 35 percent since 2019, and a group of its own employees, calling themselves Amazon Employees for Climate Justice, said that a recent Amazon claim—that it had reached its goal of matching 100 percent of its energy use with investment in sources that don’t produce greenhouse-gas emissions—used “creative accounting” to come to misleading conclusions (an allegation that Amazon disputes). The influence on the world’s objects goes beyond this. A producer of ceramic pots will take note of the kinds of ceramic pots that appear at the top of Amazon’s results and, to stay competitive, begin producing pots that resemble—and are priced competitively with—those. Maybe the pots won’t actually be ceramic. This is how the material world quietly becomes shaped by algorithm. Some friends in publishing have suggested to me that it seems the same is happening to books. With Amazon dominating the market and publicizing the titles with the most popular appeal, publishers, too, choose to focus on mass-market products—celebrity memoirs and the like—at the expense of smaller, more literary projects. A ceramic pot transforms, by Amazon’s logic, into a cast-iron oven; literature transforms, by that logic, into Prince Harry’s memoir.”
― Vauhini Vara, Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age

“Most of Amazon’s sales don’t come from its own brands—they’re from products sold by third parties—but those products are problematic, too. The staff of The Wall Street Journal was named a finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting after finding that third-party sellers on Amazon had employed people at factories known to be dangerous and had sold unsafe products. Then there are the warehouses where people pack and ship orders. In the United States, among warehouse and storage facilities with at least 1,000 workers, Amazon accounts for 79 percent of employment and 86 percent of injuries, according to the National Employment Law Project—with a rate of injuries almost triple that of Walmart. In India, the country’s commission on human rights asked the government to look into possible labor law violations at an Amazon warehouse near New Delhi, after workers complained about harsh conditions during a severe heat wave, including a lack of water and toilet breaks. Amazon spokespeople have told reporters, meanwhile, that safety for customers and workers is a top priority. They emphasize that Amazon takes action when it learns about the use of forced labor or the sale of unsafe products, and they note that Amazon’s data shows an improving safety record for workers.”
― Vauhini Vara, Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age

“Sanam was not opposed to commerce; she regularly sold her own work at galleries, and she enjoyed buying things, too. But she cared about the ethics and beauty of being able to trace, when possible, the path between the material and labor that went into a product and her own purchase of it. Shopping on Amazon was ugly to her, in all senses of the word. It cut us off from allowing our sense of touch and our tacit knowledge to play even a small role in the decision to consume and accumulate objects that fill our homes, our offices, and the world around us. As Sanam saw it, the haptic experience of making and acquiring objects, fundamental to being human for thousands of years, was being wiped out by monolithic companies like Amazon.”
― Vauhini Vara, Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age

“them. There are all kinds of ways to measure the change that has taken place in the decades since I first drove by the Elephant Car Wash, each factoid astonishing on its own. More people in the United States subscribe to Amazon Prime than the number who normally vote in presidential elections. Amazon accounts for more than a third of what people spend online in the United States. It is the second-biggest private workplace in the world, after Walmart, employing more than 1.5 million people. While fresh college graduates earning six figures as programmers can hold meetings in a giant replica of a bird’s nest perched in a spherical conservatory on Amazon’s campus in Seattle, one in four of Amazon’s warehouse workers in the United States have used the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program for low-income households. Jeff Bezos is the richest man in the world, off and on. (Elon Musk sometimes surpasses him.) The old Barnes & Noble in downtown Bellevue, meanwhile, is long gone. Amazon wanted control of all the buying and selling in the world. We gifted it to them.”
― Vauhini Vara, Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age