{"id":59801,"date":"2025-05-23T10:00:27","date_gmt":"2025-05-23T15:00:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.publicbooks.org\/?p=59801"},"modified":"2026-01-16T20:10:17","modified_gmt":"2026-01-17T02:10:17","slug":"who-owns-these-tools-vauhini-vara-and-aarthi-vadde","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.publicbooks.org\/who-owns-these-tools-vauhini-vara-and-aarthi-vadde\/","title":{"rendered":"Who Owns These Tools?: Vauhini Vara and Aarthi Vadde"},"content":{"rendered":"

Our partner podcast <\/em>Novel Dialogue<\/a> invites a novelist and a literary critic to talk about novels from every angle: how we read them, write them, publish them, and remember them. This season\u2019s signature question is: If\u00a0you could spend a year anywhere, where, when, and how would you spend it?<\/em><\/p>\n

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In an essay<\/a> about her recent book Searches<\/em>, a genre-bending chronicle of the deeply personal ways we use the internet and the uncanny ways it uses us, Vauhini Vara<\/a> admits that several reviewers seemed to mistake her engagement with ChatGPT as an uncritical embrace of large language models. Enter Aarthi Vadde<\/a> to talk with Vauhini about the power and the danger of digital tech and discuss to what it means to cocreate with AI. Vauhini tells Aarthi and host Sarah Wasserman that at the heart of all her work is a desire to communicate\u2014that \u201clanguage,\u201d as she says, \u201cis the main tool we have to bridge the divide.\u201d She explains that the motivation in Searches <\/em>as in her journalism is to test out tools that promise new forms of communication\u2014or even tools that promise to be able to communicate themselves. Amidst all her interest in new tech, Vauhini is first and foremost a writer: She and Aarthi discuss what it means to put ChatGPT on the printed page, what genre means in today\u2019s media ecosystem, and whether generative AI will steal writers\u2019 paychecks. Considering generative AI models as tools that \u201cdon\u2019t have a perspective,\u201d makes for an episode that diagnoses the future of writing with much less doomsaying than authors and critics often bring to the topic. And if all of this writing with robots sounds too \u201cout there,\u201d stay tuned for Vauhini\u2019s down-to-earth answer to our signature question.<\/p>\n

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