If AI Can Write, Why Should We?

Now that big technology companies have succeeded in getting computers to produce text that passes for something a human would write, what’s the point of human authors? 

When companies began developing AI models to produce language, Vauhini Vara was a tech reporter with early access to what would become ChatGPT. She used it to co-write an essay about her grief over her sister’s death. That essay, “Ghosts,” published in The Believer, was both more moving and more disturbing than expected. It went viral, was named one of the year’s “Best American Essays” and was eventually adapted for an episode of “This American Life.” The experience, revealing both the power and the danger of corporate-owned technologies, forced Vara to interrogate how these technologies shape her understanding of self and the world around her — the subject of her forthcoming book “Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age,” which is scheduled to be released on April 8, 2025 (Pre-order the book here).

In this discussion, moderated by Craig Watkins, Vara will tell the story of her relationship with AI as a writing tool. She will explore the opportunities and risks that arise when AI helps us communicate, and why, in an age in which computers can write, humans should keep writing at all.