When technology companies were starting to develop artificial intelligence that could write, Vauhini Vara was working on her debut novel, The Immortal King Rao, which imagines a future in which those in power deploy AI to remake all aspects of society—criminal justice, education, communication—to suit their interests. Vara got access to an early version of the AI tool that would evolve into ChatGPT and used it to co-write an essay about her grief over her sister’s death. That essay, “Ghosts,” which was published in The Believer, adapted for an episode of “This American Life,” and anthologized in Best American Essays 2022. In this talk, Vara will tell the story of her relationship with AI as a writing tool—and why, after some experiments with AI, she has returned to mostly writing the old-fashioned way—as part of an exploration of the opportunities, and risks, that arise when we turn to AI to help us communicate, and what, in an age in which computers can write, it means to be a human writer.
Event webpage: https://go.osu.edu/whyshouldhumanswrite
Event sponsors:
The “ART-ificial: An Intelligence Co-Lab” project, part of OSU’s Artificial Intelligence in the Arts, Humanities, and Engineering: Interdisciplinary Collaborations
