AI, Dystopia, and Creativity in the Future, with Novelist Vauhini Vara

Cultural Mixtapes

Last November, I had Alexander Chee on the show. And in preparation for his interview, I read The Best American Essays 2022. I came across an essay titled “Ghosts.” This essay stood out from the rest of the anthology because it seemed to have 9 iterations. When I read further, I was baffled at the idea that a writer had used Artificial Intelligence to produce prose. Even more intriguing was the fact that AI had helped this writer create a beautiful meditation on grief. After reading it a bit more closely, I realized that it wasn’t necessarily the AI that was the driving factor of this piece, but rather that the author was pushing back against the response that the AI was giving her and using that as a catalyst for poetic reflection. After reading this, I knew I had to read everything she’d written. In addition to the essay Ghosts, Vauhini Vara is the author of the novel THE IMMORTAL KING RAO. This novel was recently listed as the finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, amongst many other accolades.

Vauhini also has a book coming out on September 26th titled THIS IS SALVAGED. And in addition to her creative work, she has been a tech reporter, writing in The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, NYT Magazine, and WIRED.

I wanted to speak to Vauhini because while AI is all the rage right now, it seems that many of us don’t really know how to talk about it. AI’s ubiquity, brought on by the launch of CHAT GPT at the end of last year, has clear implications, economically, and culturally, but what are those implications? And how strongly will they influence the future.

THE IMMORTAL KING RAO tells a generational story of a family coconut grove in India, and the subsequent founding of a multinational tech corporation that goes on to rule the world. As someone who’s covered almost two decades of technological development and also spent 13 years imagining a technocratic future and all its ramifications, Vauhini is the perfect person to give us a read about the intersection of art and technology. We sat down in Early August to speak about her novel, as well as recent developments in Artificial Intelligence, and finally her moving collection of stories. From an artist attempting to bring the Bible to life, to telemarketers discovering intimacy, THIS IS SALVAGED truly packs a punch and is out today.

Vauhini's Website

The Immortal King Rao

This is Salvaged

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