Vara wrote the wonderful novel The Immortal King Rao, and her new book of essays, Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age, comes out next week.
I love talking to people. I love knowing people’s stories. There’s so much richness in the way all of us tell stories, not just those of us who are employed as writers. In my work as a journalist, I’ve always found that compelling. I did this project several years ago where I collected oral histories from workers who have jobs that didn’t exist a generation ago. I felt like I was making an implicit argument. Anytime we publish oral histories, we’re making an implicit argument for the artistry of language, all our language. It’s not just those of us who are employed as writers who can tell stories, and I love that.
The way LLMs function is sort of the opposite. There’s this flattening effect of the technology. Because it’s built to try to sound like this idea of the average human it then doesn’t sound like any actual real human. The specificity of our experience is what makes it interesting to hear about one another’s experiences. People are nuts. I could not dream up, and an LLM could not dream up, all the interesting ways that people answered those questions.