Ghosts

Illustration by Jesse Zhang | The Believer

Do you remember a crucial moment or event in your life that you really wanted to write about—maybe to help you understand it more fully? Yet no matter how hard you tried, you just couldn’t find the words? That’s what happened to Vauhini Vara, whose sister was diagnosed with cancer when they were both in high school. Her death four years later left Vara feeling like a ghost, one who was unable to write about her sister’s death. That’s when she, a reporter and editor, turned to a relatively new kid on the technology block: Chat GPT. Read on to see what happened when Vara asked AI to take over and write about her sister’s death for her. Be prepared for more than a few surprises! Vara’s essay was first published in 2021 in The Believer, a quarterly arts and literature magazine.

Read it here.

EXPLORE, REFLECT, SPEAK UP.

1. In the opening paragraphs of this essay, Vauhini Vara explains, in straightforward and dispassionate prose, what led her to begin writing with AI; she wanted to see if and how AI could help her write about her sister’s death. Though Vara never evaluates the material that AI produces, what implicit argument do you think she is making about AI’s ability to write for her?
2. Vara refers to the nine pieces of human/AI writing that make up the rest of the essay as “stories.”  Why might she have chosen this term and how does thinking of them as stories affect the way you read and understand them? 
3. LET’S TALK. Working with two or three classmates, choose one of the nine “stories” and read the two parts of it aloud.  What differences can you detect between the bold text written by Vara and the AI additions: consider choice of words, sentence length and structure, tone, and use of rhetorical strategies such as repetition. Does the AI writing sound like Vara? Why or why not?
4. AND NOW WRITE. Vara’s essay was published in 2021, when AI bots were fairly new. Working with the latest version of a contemporary bot, try replicating Vara’s experiment, offering an opening sentence about an important event in your life and asking it to extend the “story.” Continue by adding a sentence or two to what you had originally written along with the same prompt. Finally, write a brief response about what you have learned about human/machine writing from this experiment. Bring the results to class for discussion and comparison.