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This month’s selection
April 2025
Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age
From the author of The Immortal King Rao, finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, a personal exploration of how technology companies have both fulfilled and exploited the human desire for understanding and connection
When it was released to the public in November 2022, ChatGPT awakened the world to a secretive project: teaching AI-powered machines to write. Its creators had a sweeping ambition--to build machines that could not only communicate, but could do all kinds of other activities, better than humans ever could. But was this goal actually achievable? And if reached, would it lead to our liberation or our subjugation?Vauhini Vara, an award-winning tech journalist and editor, had long been grappling with these questions. In 2021, she 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, forced Vara to interrogate how these technologies have influenced her understanding of her self and the world around her, from discovering online chat rooms as a preteen, to using social media as the Wall Street Journal's first Facebook reporter, to asking ChatGPT for writing advice--while compelling her to add to the trove of human-created material exploited for corporations' financial gain. Interspersed throughout this investigation are her own Google searches, Amazon reviews, and the other raw material of internet life--including the viral AI experiment that started it all. Searches illuminates how technological capitalism is both shaping and exploiting human existence, while proposing that by harnessing the collective creativity that makes humans unique, we might imagine a freer, more empowered relationship with our machines and, ultimately, with one another.more
Previous selections from Belletrist
Belletrist has selected a book each month since 2017. See the full archive
The Strange Case of Jane O.
Karen Thompson Walker
The Mystery Guest: A True Story
Grégoire Bouillier
The Motherload: Episodes from the Brink of Motherhood
Sarah Hoover
Darkly
Marisha Pessl
Didion and Babitz
Lili Anolik
Intermezzo
Sally Rooney
Bright I Burn
Molly Aitken
Five-Star Stranger
Kat Tang
Long Island Compromise
Taffy Brodesser-Akner
The Friday Afternoon Club: A Family Memoir
Griffin Dunne
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