Actual Rating: 3.5 stars
<i>Searches</i> delves into technology and its impacts on our lives. Specifically centered around ChatGPT, Vara explores communication through technology from the start of the internet age to now, and even questions what the future will look like.

Vara’s relationship with ChatGPT is significant to her career as a technology reporter and as a writer of fiction. In 2021, Vara used ChatGPT to write about the death of her sister. This catapulted her exploration of AI and writing, and what technology has become to those who use it. Vara is honest in reflecting on problems with technology these days, namely the lack of privacy and use of our data to further Big Tech’s success and influence in our lives. Vara also writes about how hard it is to not use Amazon, social media, etc. This complicated issue usually results in being for or against these technologies, but Vara honestly explores concerns and also the conveniences technology offers. There is a reason these technologies are as successful as they are, but there is also a real need to question why and how things are being done and what it means in the long run.

The writing in this book is experimental at times. Vara’s conversations with AI are a large part of this book. Vara also uses AI to explore language and translators, to create pictures, and also to write. Reading these chapters may show people just how advanced (or not) AI currently is. At times, these techniques got repetitious and tiresome to read.

The ideas explored in <i>Searches</i> is incredibly important in this day and age. Whether you know a lot about AI or not, this book offers an interesting exploration of technology past and present. Vara’s own life and experiences makes this book relatable and gives a more personable view on a large and complicated topic. While I found some parts a slog to get through, I appreciate Vara’s use of unconventional narrative structures.

i’ve grown up pretty much simultaneously with google and social media and have always been pretty lax about how they use my data. AI, however, is something i’ve been quite wary of using and just not very familiar with. if you’re already quite interested in tech, you might already know the history of these platforms that’s covered early on in the book. if you’re not, like me, i think this is a great crash course on how we got ✨here✨

i have mixed opinions on how much of this book was co-written with AI. after every couple of chapters, we would read AI-generated feeback on those chapters. i wish this had been used a bit less, with more of vara’s chapters in between. i was also really intrigued to see how vauhini vara would combine tech with the grief of losing her sister at a young age. the essay that she co-wrote with chatgpt about her sister’s death really highlights how bad the technology is at coming up with compelling writing. it got tiring to read the AI-generated portions at times, but i think that was the point. it serves as a great reminder of the pitfalls of AI. vauhini vara’s writing style was very readable and full of nuance, so no complaints there.

i have a feeling we will see more and more books with a similar premise to this one, but at this point in time searches feels fresh and thought-provoking.

This was excellent. I've been reading a lot of long-form journalism about AI's impact but this one shows the intersection with writing and how we think about ourselves in relation to storytelling and our digital footprint more than anything else. It's such a rich and beautifully written personal story, too.

I did find that it trailed off a bit towards the end, and although at first I really enjoyed reading ChatGPT's response to her chapters, including them in their entirety or near-entirety felt like overkill. I have to read a lot of ChatGPT output for my work and it is SO wordy and all worded so similarly, it was often tough to slog through because it's just so dull. I actually read an interview with the author where she explains some analysis of the ChatGPT's output, like how it was slightly manipulative, and I wish that had actually been included in the book.

But it's an incredibly unique work, and I hope it gets a lot of traction because it's so important and indicative of how our future alongside AI is shaping up to look.

As an artist and educator, there is no world in which I could be convinced of the merits of generative AI—and I am increasingly frustrated and demoralized by how it's seemed to seep its way into every aspect of our digital lives. That being said, I have very mixed feelings about this book, and have put off writing this review because I've needed time to sit with it.

Some parts of this book were incredibly well-researched, like the exploration 0f various tech giants such as Facebook/Zuckerberg and Amazon/Bezos. Other parts were deeply moving, especially Vara's reflections on the grief of her sister. The concept of writing a book "in collaboration" with AI is interesting, and in this case I think it proved how AI is not currently capable of matching human emotion and style. However, I wish Vara had been more clear about the dangers of this technology.

One line from this book stuck out to me: "I could live without ChatGPT, but I don't." This line was preceded by a number of questions Vara had recently asked ChatGPT, many of which could have easily been a Google search. I feel like this behavior and some of the chapters in this book are irresponsible uses of AI, given the technology's massive environmental impact and the way it trains itself based on input from users. I could have done without the chapter that is essentially an imaginary business pitch using generative AI images, for example. I would expect a writer to be more careful using a tool that could have such major ramifications for the publishing industry (and really, all industries).

Overall, I still enjoyed this book for the fact that it demonstrates AI's limited capabilities—I just hope others reading it will be able to have the same takeaway.

Thank you to NetGalley and Pantheon for an eARC of this book in exchange for my honest review.

I fell immediately under the spell of persuasive, articulate Vauhini Vara with the remarkable exploration of our world and ourselves as shaped and connected by technology in the nonfiction book SEARCHES. Throughout this excellent book, I was enraptured by wonderful writing and powerful examples and arguments for considering our stance toward the desired ends and actual results of technology as tool, connector, and homogenizing, damaging thing that's supposed to help us, but truly serves only itself and its masters. I suspected much of what I learned, but Vara laid it out with an insider knowledge and deep compassion, making it easily one of the best books I've read in a long time. I received a copy of this book and these thoughts are my own, unbiased opinions.

Will writers be forced to collaborate with AI to remain relevant in the future? Pulitzer Prize finalist Vauhini Vara won’t necessarily give you an answer to this question in her latest book, the essay collection Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age, which delves into our relationship with technology in general and AI in particular, but it may help you find your own conclusion. The form of this book seems, on its face, to be a collaboration with the large language models that have taken the world by storm, but it soon reveals itself as an interrogation. Blending memoir, reporting, and experimental writing—with Google searches, Amazon reviews, and AI-generated text—Vara deftly explores both the possibilities and the costs of technological progress.

We spoke about the book and what it means to be human in an era where our words, thoughts, and identities are constantly mediated by algorithms and shaped by technology that is in turn shaped by us.

Interview here: https://chireviewofbooks.com/2025/04/08/writing-in-the-age-of-ai-vauhini-varas-new-book-searches-explores-the-power-of-language/

Fascinating, both in content and form. Bursting to discuss! I handle our store's Fiction books, but this is one of those standout Nonfiction books I'll be recommending.

I first encountered Vara’s writing in her viral essay about using AI to connect with her late sister in Believer Magazine. That fantastic essay is included in this wonderful collection about our relationship with technology in our lives.

Vara uses her life to frame the history of the internet, such as websites like Google, Amazon, Facebook and Instagram. Using her searches and purchases she analyzes the impact the internet has had on our lives. The impact smartphones have had on connecting us and isolating us. How we represent our lives on social media vs. how they actually are. The impact of ChatGPT and AI images. Vara connects all these things to her personal experiences which demonstrates their impact. I loved that she had AI write a response to each chapter, or showing a conversation she has with AI that relates to the topic. It was a creative way to show the limits and distortions of AI.

I would recommend this book to anyone interested in AI and the internet’s impact on society and our lives personally. This book was so engaging to read. I’m thinking more about my searches and the algorithms that produce search results or what come up on my social media feeds since I read it. An easy 5 stars!

Searches is part memoir, critique, and meditation on the internet and how we interact with it. I found the experimental chapters interesting in some ways but grating in others. I really wasn't a fan of the chapters that were made up of random search terms and the ChatGPT chapter analyses. The chapters around the loss of her sister stood out the most and were some of the best chapters.

Thanks to NetGalley and Pantheon for the ARC of this title.

This is a 3.5 rounded up to 4. When the essays in this book nail it, they nail. it. Moving, thoughtful, doing great work in thinking about what the current round of LLM can do and is useful for.

I'm fine with the overall bridging sections with a Chat GPT (or ChatGPT-alike) reviews the last few chapters as a framing mechanism, but so many of the essays feel like good conceptual _ideas_ for essays set up in the chapter immediately preceding them that, once executed, are nowhere near as fun to engage with as a reader vs. as a thought experiment.

"I decided if I was going to use Amazon less, I'd need to write a review for any product I purchased."
Cool.

[an essay consisting of the product reviews]
Meh.

An essay engaging with AI image generation's biases around women and people of color? Great!

A story that uses AI image generation to showcase this in the form of a fictional investor pitch that shows how those tools illustrate some claims vs. others when race/gender in included in the prompt?

interesting as a thought experiment as a potential illustration, deeply frustrating to read, especially thinking about the resources needed to generate (and possible re-generate) the images.

The essays that were the clear driver for this book shine, I just wish the rest wasn't so reliant on engaging with LLMs to do the work.

An interdisciplinary collection of essays and digital ephemera, Searches is ambitious in its scope and succeeds at delivering a thoughtful meditation on the ways in which technology captures, forms, and projects identity. Journalist and millenial, Vauhini Vara, situates herself within the technological advances of the 21st century, tracing the rise of each of the big tech giants, Google, Amazon, X, Meta, and OpenAI and reflecting on her interactions (past and present) with their products. Interwoven into and in between the essays are digital curiosa: Google searches, X interests, Amazon Prime purchases, Google translations, AI images and ChatGPT. Vara lets the reader consider what is on the page in these computer-generated interludes, asking us if these digital tokens capture or dilute the reality they represent. If you are reading this book for clear answers to the philosophical questions Vara poses, you will be left dissatisfied. Building on her popular previously published essay Ghosts - which was interpreted by many as in support of AI - Searches allows Vara to set the record straight, clarifying her far more nuanced perspective, but leaving more questions than she answers.

This book should be top of the list and recommended to anyone feeling vertigo from their digital consumption, as Vara’s reflections invite readers to take the experiment forward and situate themselves within their own technologies. The highest compliment I could pay to Vara is that Searches shares similarities with Annie Ernaux’s The Years; at its strongest, it is a collective history of the social influence of big tech refracted through the lens of one individual’s life and the digital artifacts that represent it.

Deeply personal, lyrical and thought-provoking essays from one of the most original voices on new technologies. She skilfully blends recollections from the early days of the Internet with the most pressing questions about our privacy and identity. Fresh and surprising.

Thanks to the publisher, Pantheon, and NetGalley for an advanced copy of this book.

Most Seattlites, whether or not they work in Big Tech, have a general idea of how tech monoliths like Amazon, Microsoft, etc have transformed the city in the past few decades. Searches provide in-depth background, critical analysis and personal experience on the impact of modern tech advances, as author and tech journalist Vauhini Vara illustrates her experience growing up during the tech boom. The book starts with reminding us that these companies used to be lauded for their progressive values, innovative ideas, and even philanthropy (i.e., Mackenzie Scott). I also didn’t know about Paul Allen (Microsoft co-founder) saving the Seahawks from having to relocate to LA, so that was a neat piece of local history.

I enjoyed the conversational writing style, and the book dives deeply into the origins of the internet and social media to the situation we have today, leaning into the motives of key players like Zuckerberg, Musk, Pichai, Altman, etc. Vara actually starts off describing her first experiences with chat rooms and AOL and moves seamlessly into investigative reporting on the lawsuits and incursions wrought by social media and tech giants, even divulging little known facts, like Zuckerberg naming his kids after Roman emperors, which is simultaneously appalling and typical at the same time.

Each chapter alternates between Vara’s voice and some feature of tech. For instance, when Vara writes about Google, the next chapter lists a bunch of Google searches. When she writes about Amazon and how her friend abstains from shopping on Amazon, the next chapter is filled with her Amazon reviews. Each chapter is also fed into ChatGPT to form a mini summary/analysis at the end. The AI-based chapters were kind of a chore to read, a stark contrast to the sheer brilliance and insight of the author’s original writing. I do appreciate the author’s creativity and experimental take on this stylistic choice; however, it would’ve been more effective if there were less content produced by ChatGPT, maybe or 2 chapters would’ve sufficed.

Special thanks to Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage, and Anchor and NetGalley for providing an eARC in exchange for an honest, independent review.

Review posted to StoryGraph and Goodreads on 3/28/25. Review will be posted to Amazon on release date.

An interesting exploration of technologies and capitalism in our lives both positively and negatively. I personally do not use AI generative applications like Chat GPT but found it interesting to see how these applications built by scrubbing the works of others would interpret works written about them and their founders. I could relate to Vara in this pull between knowing all the things that entities like Meta, Amazon, and Google due to surveil us and yet not being able to stop using their services due to the convenience and reliance we’ve developed with them. Ultimately I found the chapter Ghosts to be the most illuminating surrounding the limitations of AI. It can try to replicate the way humans talk and sound but it ultimately will always add in information that isn’t true and feels unauthentic to the piece. This will be a book that I think about often as I continue to explore my own use with technology in our capitalistic society.

Thanks to NetGalley and Pantheon for this advance readers copy, in exchange for an honest review. Searches is the author’s meditation on her lived experience and observations about the rise of artificial intelligence, with commentary starting at even the rise of the internet and its availability for widespread use.

I appreciated the author’s vulnerability and personal commentary throughout the book; I thought that the different structure she used throughout was certainly unique although at times, a little much to keep up with. I did particularly appreciate the interactions with AI critiquing the book, as I thought this was pretty clever and interesting to think about, given her points in this book. I don’t know if I was necessarily the best audience for this, as I struggled to maintain interest throughout. However, I would definitely recommend this book to anyone interested in this advance of AI and its personal impacts on the human experience.

Thanks to Pantheon and Netgalley for this advanced copy!

Searches is a meditation on technology, our sense of self, what we put out into this world, and what we are getting back from it. I sometimes struggle with books that have unique and often changing structures, but Searches pulled me in and I appreciated how each chapter wasn't forced to conform to a style, but was set up to best illustrate the point the author was making. This type of style change can feel gimmicky in the wrong hands, but Vara uses it well and it adds to the reading experience, as well as the theme. On top of that, I don't know that I needed to read another book or article about tech and our lives, but by centering much of this book around Vara's life, and the loss of her sister, Vara humanizes this conversation in a way so few do.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for providing me with an ARC of Searches! Honestly, by the time I got to the end, I had a lot of conflicting opinions about the text. Ultimately, in my opinion, I felt that it was trying to be too many things at once. Part critical analysis, part memoir, part abstract theorizing and rumination. Certain aspects of it worked for me, while others did not. I particularly did not enjoy the author’s handwringing about her use of Amazon and generative AI. The moral grandstanding that we all have to deal with these days, whether from politicians or from friends and family, is already exhausting, and having to read an entire chapter’s worth of Amazon reviews doesn’t make me gain any sympathy for the author. My own qualms aside, though, the use of AI as a source of external commentary on the text of the novel was something I found interesting. The juxtaposition of the author’s writing—often complex and interwoven with thought and emotion in a way AI can hardly replicate, in my opinion—and the AI’s formulaic, repetitive responses was stark, and gave me a lot of food for thought on the ways in which we have been letting AI permeate our lives. I also liked Vara’s interrogation and challenging of ChatGPT throughout the text, particularly as it pertained to tone, portrayals of figures like Sam Altman, and strategies to ingratiate itself with the user. While not a particularly groundbreaking reflection on AI and the role of technology in our lives, Searches was overall an interesting read.

This book does what it’s trying to do well and creatively. Though opposed to AI, I thought the interspersing of AI-generated feedback between chapters was innovative. It showed the AI’s storytelling is inferior to Vara’s lived experience. A super interesting read but one I worry will lose relevance as more generative models come into being.

Thank you for NetGalley and Pantheon for the ARC.

4.5 ⭐️

When I initially read the description, I thought this was going to be hyper fixated on open AI and ChatGPT. But I enjoyed reading both her perspective and the AI from her chapters. Some parts of the reading are hard to get through and a little dull, but I feel as if that was her point. I do think that this is an important conversation to have because she points out a lot of originality and personal touches that are lost through the advancement of AI.

Overall, I really enjoyed reading this book. I was already interested in topics like this, but I really appreciate the perspective of this author.

Thank you NetGalley for sending me this E-ARC for review!!

I get what this book is trying to do. The recent history of tech and the changing relationship we have to social media is valuable. I like how the author moves between the personal and the political and how she uses formal experimentation to get at her points in a different way. I've just become such an AI hater recently, so it's tough for me to comment objectively on the sections between the essays where the book has AI "feedback," summary, and commentary. I think it's really banal and takes away from the humanity and skill of the actual essays.