Vauhini Vara | The Impact of AI on Writing: What We Stand to Gain — and Lose — in Communication

In 2021, the novelist and journalist Vauhini Vara asked a predecessor of ChatGPT to write about her sister’s death, resulting in an essay that was both more moving and more disturbing than she could have imagined. It quickly went viral. The experience, revealing both the power and the danger of corporate-owned technologies, led Vara on an investigation of what we gain and what we lose when we use large language models to help us communicate. In this seminar, she will discuss this experience and other similar literary experiments with AI models — including what happened when she fed most of her recently released book Searches into ChatGPT and asked for feedback — as a springboard to discuss the difference between human- and AI-produced text and how AI could change the way all of us, writers or not, communicate.