More than a year ago, Melody put a placeholder in our shared podcast planning document: SOMETHING SMART ABOUT AI. We were sick, bored, or frustrated with the way so many podcasts were talking about it — usually because it involved dudes talking with other dudes and universalizing proclamations about whether artificial intelligence was going to usher in an age of utopia (doubtful) or kill us all (doubtful but more probable). We wanted someone willing to get into the gray areas of LLM and chatbot use in particular — someone with real experience with what they can do and real ambivalence about what they do to us.
That person is Vauhini Vara, author of Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age, and one of my absolute favorite thinkers working and writing today. In this episode, we talk about how LLMs short circuit the creative process, how they're changing the way students learn to think and discern, the specious argument that AI "democratizes creativity," really bad AI art, and why it's so hard to talk about AI usage just generally. I loved this conversation and keep coming back to the ideas, challenges, hopes, and frustrations we discussed — I think you will too.
AI comes for the Community Flyer
Anne Helen Petersen: This is the Culture Study Podcast, and I'm Anne Helen Petersen.
Vauhini Vara: And I'm Vauhini Vara, and I'm the author of Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age, and a journalist who writes about AI and technology and society.
Anne Helen Petersen: We're gonna start with some compliments.
Vauhini Vara: Aw.
Anne Helen Petersen: Searchers was one of the best books that I read last year.
And you know, I don't know if you saw this, but this was total coincidence. I had my friend Maris, who is a book critic, she did her top 10 of the year and did it on Culture Study did a year-end list, and Searches was number one on the list. I was like…
Vauhini Vara: It's okay. I saw that! I saw that too.
I think I may have told you this in an email at some point, but I can see my book sales statistics on the Penguin Random House dashboard. And the day that you published a newsletter saying, like, "Here is my favorite book of the year so far," or whatever is the single day, I think other than the day the book came out, the single day with the highest book sales ever. So you have a special place in my publisher's heart too, I think.
Anne Helen Petersen: Well, and the book itself, I think is, it's so squarely in the Culture Study audience. Like, it's just doing interesting, weird things. Like, it's combining creativity, but also interrogating the world around us in all of these different ways.
Like, how do you... When people say, "What's your book about?" what do you usually say?
Vauhini Vara: It took me a long time to figure this out, but what I tell people is that it's a book that talks about and also enacts the way in which we use big technology companies' products for all these things like communion and self-expression and usefulness.
And at the same time, while that's all true, it's also true that we're participating in our own exploitation by these companies' products.
Anne Helen Petersen: Yes. And you also, your 2021 essay Ghosts, which was published in The Believer, was one of the first things that I think I read that was using one of these technologies. The other person who does it is Patricia Lockwood. But like, using these new technologies as a part of the creative process. So can you describe that essay for our listeners, and how you came up with the idea to even feed things into a chatbot?
Vauhini Vara: Yes. So as a journalist, I had been writing about technology for a long time, and in 2017 I wrote a profile of Sam Altman, who would go on to become the CEO of OpenAI.
Anne Helen Petersen: This is nuts.
Vauhini Vara: And when I was reporting on that, he was talking about OpenAI, and I did a little reporting on it, but then a couple of years later I started hearing about this thing called GPT, and then it was called GPT-2, and then it was called GPT-3, and it was this technology that could produce language. And it wasn't a chatbot then.
The way it worked then was, you would type some words and press a button, and then it would kind of continue that as if it were you.
Anne Helen Petersen: Yeah. Yeah.
Vauhini Vara: And so I still had his phone number from when I had reported on that profile, so I texted him and said, "Hey, I heard you're letting researchers and journalists try out this GPT thing. Can I try it out?" And he connected me, you know, with OpenAI's PR person or whatever, and they said, "Sure, you can have access." And so I was thinking, as a journalist, I was thinking a lot at the time, as I always do, about, like, what tech companies promise us, like what their marketing message is, basically.
And I was like, well, what is the promise of a technology that can, like, complete your sentence? Like, why would anybody want that?
Anne Helen Petersen: Mm-hmm.
Vauhini Vara: And that got me thinking about the fact that, well, you would want that if there are things that you don't know how to say. And being a writer myself, I generally, if I spend enough time on it, can think of what I wanna say about something.
But something that I had always struggled to not just write about, but talk about, was the death of my sister and my grief over it, all these years earlier, like 20 years earlier. Like, partly out of this intellectual exercise, but partly out of, like, this personal emotional desire, I was like, "Well, what would happen if I went to this thing and typed a sentence about my sister and pressed this button and had this technology complete it for me?"
And so I went to this thing called GPT-3 at the time, and I typed in, "When I was in my freshman year of high school and my sister was in her junior year, she was diagnosed with Ewing sarcoma." And then I hit the button, and then it just kept writing something for me, about this basically fictional sister of this fictional narrator. And it was all wrong. And so I was like, "Oh, okay, that didn't work." And so I deleted all that, and I kept my first sentence, and then I just wrote some more on my own, and then hit the button again. And then that time it, like, in some ways got a bit closer, and I thought, "Okay, well, it seems like the more I reveal, the more this machine can potentially write something that has some relation to my actual experience."
And so I just did that over and over. But ultimately for me, the endpoint of that exercise, and this is very personal, I think other people read it differently, but for me the endpoint was like, okay, actually as close as this product to be superficially gets to describing something about grief or sisterhood or death or me, it's not actually scratching that itch that I have to express something on my own about the actual death of my actual sister.
Anne Helen Petersen: Yeah. Right. 'Cause part of the itch is like you have to write it, right? It makes me think of the Elizabeth Bishop poem, "One Art" where at the very end it's about like, "The art of losing things isn't hard to master," and then she gets to the very last line, and this just always sticks with me. She's like, "You have to write it." Like, there's a little interjection and she just says, it's like her saying to herself, "Write it-" like disaster. Like, you have to - something internal is saying, like, "Just put it on the page," right? "Just get it out there." And ChatGPT-3 was short-circuiting that alchemy, that moment that is so essential.
Vauhini Vara: Exactly. Yeah. It was like, oh, of course, like the thing that I'm struggling with isn't like some set of words on the page. It's like the actual expression.
Anne Helen Petersen: Yep. And I love the point, and I think you talk about this in Searches, I'm trying to remember that you look back on part of what it wrote, like this thing about like my hand, the hand that held my sister's hand.
Like, the chatbot was embodying this feeling. But it's still like it wasn't your feeling. Like it was a beautiful sentence, but it wasn't your feeling. It was someone, something else's feeling.
Vauhini Vara: Yeah, I mean what was confusing to me just to complicate it even more though, and what continues to be confusing and fascinating to me about this essay, which like always, I keep uncovering new layers in this essay that I wrote years ago, is that I love this one sentence you're referring to, or this one passage where like it invents me and my sister sitting in the car and we're driving home, and she's dying, and she holds my hand, and then it says, the product says, like, "This is the hand she held," the hand that I write with, the hand I am writing this with, which is so meta because I didn't actually write that, right?
But it did capture something that I hadn't noticed about what the essay was about, which is like the difficulty of reconciling the self that exists now with the self that existed when my sister was alive. And I think anybody who's lost someone or even ended a relationship will be familiar with that feeling of like, wait, who am I if I'm not in the world with this other person anymore, right?
Anne Helen Petersen: Yeah ...
Vauhini Vara: And I hadn't articulated to myself that that's what this essay was about, but then this line meant that to me. And so then the interesting question is like, well, there isn't like a person writing those couple of sentences.
It's just like this predictive machine spitting out words. Where does the meaning come from then? And of course, the answer is the meaning is actually coming from me. Like I'm the only one putting the meaning there, or a reader, any reader of that essay is the one creating that meaning there. It's like this one-sided creation of meaning. And then the kind of mind-bending question is like, well, you could say, well, isn't that meaning nonetheless? Like can't it be beautiful? Or not?
Anne Helen Petersen: Right. Oh my gosh, I'm just thinking back to like my grad school days of reader response theory and oh, the meaning is made in this moment, but what if the text itself is, like there's no author, right?
The author is dead and all of the meaning is coming from how we receive it in that moment.
Vauhini Vara: Exactly. Yeah ...
Anne Helen Petersen: Okay, you and I are approximately the same age. You were born in 1982, is it?
Vauhini Vara: Yeah, '82.
Anne Helen Petersen: So we both grew up screwing around on the internet, and I think sometimes, like I was watching my friend's kids the other day try to find something that, like a video that they were looking for on YouTube, and they just like, they're just not playing as much.
They're not just, they're just not being as weird as we were, and I think that we had this opportunity to really kind of, for lack of a better word, like fuck around with the technology, like try to make it work in weird ways. Do you feel like that?
Vauhini Vara: I mean, I think that continues to happen, I would say. I am just…
Anne Helen Petersen: You do it. You're doing it.
Vauhini Vara: Well, no, but I'm thinking about TikTok, which I'm not on some of these platforms, right? But I'm thinking about the way in which people do invent these new ways of talking or behaving or interacting with each other, on platforms like TikTok where you have the freedom to do that.
And yet, at the same time, it's all mediated by algorithms in a way that was, maybe I was gonna say less true for us, but maybe not even at all true for us because the internet didn't work that way. So whereas back then, you and I could put all kinds of weird experiments onto the internet or be versions of ourselves in interesting ways. And it was just us interacting with other people through a screen. Now there's always this algorithm in between, right? So now you're always performing for an algorithm in addition to for other people, and I would say that that corrupts the ability of 22-year-olds today to feel as fully free as we might have felt as 22-year-olds or 13-year-olds.
Anne Helen Petersen: Right. Right, and just feeling like you are passive to it instead of an active manipulator of it if that makes sense.
Vauhini Vara: Yeah ...
Anne Helen Petersen: The one thing I do wanna do right from the top is a lot of people online get cranky about using the bucket term AI to talk about some of the things that we're gonna talk about today.
So when you think about the various containers within this larger designation of AI, what do you think of? 'Cause I'm thinking of LLMs and chatbots, and that's different than, I don't know, predictive text when you're texting. Is it also different from, like, using Grammarly?
How do you think about it?
Vauhini Vara: Yeah. So I mean, I think there are some of these things that are similar. Like I would argue that using Grammarly actually maybe is in a similar category as using ChatGPT. However, people will sometimes refer to AI that can do the work of a radiologist. Yeah. Like can read a scan, right? And that's something different. So maybe we say for the purposes of this conversation when we use the shorthand AI, what we're referring to, to use just simple language, is AI that can generate text and AI that can generate images and videos.
Anne Helen Petersen: Yeah. Okay. I like that. Like us to have our terms at the beginning.
And then the other thing, we often in this show, try to kind of put our cards on the table in terms of positionality, and usually that's like, how we relate to a text. Like, how did you read this growing up? Like, do you have feelings about this? Like, we did an episode about Little House on the Prairie, and I'm like, "This is my positionality with Little House on the Prairie."
But I think it's important here too, so I'll just say that I am very resistant to using any sort of LLM predictive text tools in any of my work to the extent that I have like all of these complex settings turned off in my Chrome, my Google searches so that I don't get even the summary when I do a Google search.
I don't like that. Like, to me it short-circuits something. But I'm frustrated with it because now, this Google search doesn't work the same way that it used to, so it doesn't give me the good stuff that I want. I also feel very frustrated with the way that people have conversations about AI online, because it's very black or white.
Like, it's either like pure boosterism or if you use it, if you use LLMs in any capacity in your work, you should be canceled kind of situation, right? So how do you... How are you feeling right now about it?
Vauhini Vara: Ooh, yeah, no, I love that opportunity for us to just get to lay it out that way.
I, myself have used AI in my work specifically as a way to show how these products function and try to shed light on like the power dynamics and the market dynamics inherent in how these products work.
Anne Helen Petersen: Yeah.
Vauhini Vara: So for me, like I'm always trying to -- I think of myself as using these products as a way to critique them.
That said, some people might say, one thing I could potentially say is like that's how I use them and that's the only way I think anybody should use them. I actually don't have a position on how people should or shouldn't use AI. I think for us as artists or writers or journalists, it does feel really important, and I think I would kind of draw a line in the sand around transparency and disclosure.
It feels really important that we tell people whether and how we are using these products. Maybe it's important that we tell people what the goal is in using these products if we do. So I wouldn't say like, you know, you can't be an artist, you can't be a journalist, you can't be a professional in the world if you use these in any capacity.
But I would encourage people to sort of think critically about how and why they are using these products, what the goal is, what the benefit is, what the cost is, not just to them, but more broadly of using these kinds of products.
Anne Helen Petersen: Yeah. Just think much more contextually and sociologically.
Vauhini Vara: Yeah.
Anne Helen Petersen: Well then we wanted -
Vauhini Vara: Oh, wait, can I add one more thing actually that I didn't think of? I also just wanted to say sometimes when we talk, just again as we like are defining our terms, when we talk about AI, usually we're talking about AI products from big technology companies.
So like Google and OpenAI and Anthropic. And I do know a lot of artists who are using AI in their practice, but they're like building their own small models. They're collaborating with other artists in a way that doesn't use environmental resources the way that the really big corporate models do, that aren't bound up in labor exploitation or exploitation of other people's creative work in the way that the big models do, and that's an interesting distinction to make too.
Anne Helen Petersen: Yeah. And the other thing I always think we all, like we're part of all, like as authors we have a stake in this, a literal financial stake because of the Anthropic settlement. Like was your book in there? Were any of your books in there?
Vauhini Vara: Mine weren't because they were all pre the cutoff date.
Anne Helen Petersen: Oh. Yeah. My first three books, all of them, all in there
Vauhini Vara: Oh, wow. Yeah.
Anne Helen Petersen: Supposedly that means I'm getting, I don't know, somewhere like between $6,000 and $9,000. Woo! Such a great compensation for just scraping all of my labor. I know. But I sometimes I forget that.
I'm like, "Oh my God," like I am technically a shareholder almost in Anthropic because of the way that they have used my work. But then also I am in Facebook and all of the work that Facebook has done, like, they're predictive of everything, like all of our data. We have all been complicit, for lack of a better word, in forming this.
Vauhini Vara: Yeah, and I think writers and artists are especially attuned to this, but it's true of anybody who has been on the internet and written anything or posted images. Like that is all being sucked up without compensation or disclosure, or consent by these companies' products.
Anne Helen Petersen: So we have really great listener questions that are gonna allow us to poke into the murky gray areas, and I think this submission from Auburn is gonna help us frame our whole conversation.
Auburn: "So many of the conversations that I've read or heard about AI and creativity seem to attempt a balanced approach by starting with a long list of harms as a sort of disclaimer up front, like one I'm about to do.
They acknowledge environmental harms like data centers and water, copyright theft, inherent bias, fake citations, harms on mental health, regular use leading to reduced cognitive ability, setting expectations for kind of a sycophantic approach to relationships, and the racist and colonial impact of that harm distribution Then a lot of those conversations move on to addressing the pros of how can AI help us manage admin and creative tasks without going back and actually engaging with those cons.
Feels like more of a harmful version of doing a land acknowledgement with no further action. What I would love to hear is a conversation that starts with something like, "AI can help people do X. Who bears the harm when they do? Is that worth it, and who decides? AI can also do Y. How does that measure against the harms that we all acknowledged? And do less harmful alternatives to these tasks exist?"
I have high hopes that your brilliant team and academic minds can approach any topic with nuance, and I'm looking forward to hearing it.
Anne Helen Petersen: This is a good, like very important ask, but a difficult one, too.
Vauhini Vara: Yes. I mean, it's funny. I don't know if this will be disappointing or not, or gratifying to Auburn, but honestly, I would say like 10 out of 10, no notes. That is exactly the right approach for these conversations, and I share that that frustration and concern. I have written journalistically about AI in schools, about how AI companies are pushing their products into schools.
And a lot of the pedagogy around AI in schools, like around how teachers are meant to be talking to students around AI, involves saying like, "Oh, here are the costs, but anyway, here's how we're gonna use AI in class." Like "You should use it ethically. Make sure you're using it ethically," rather than framing it the way that you're describing, Auburn, which is like let us have that all be one conversation.
So yeah, I agree. I think that's the problem. And in my book, I write a lot about, and kind of enact a lot that real, like that hypocrisy on my part, on all of our part…
Anne Helen Petersen: Yep.
Vauhini Vara: … that comes with acknowledging all of these things and then saying, "But it's useful to me." And we don't do it just with AI, we do it every time we buy something on Amazon.
We use it any time we search on Google. We do it any time we post or consume something on social media. AI is like a particularly potent, I think, example of how we participate in our own exploitation because there's something about the product that we find useful or entertaining. And I think interrogating that is like a requirement of all of us, and I think I would describe it as like the human condition more generally, because like we're the most destructive animal, violent animal on this planet, and yet, there's something about our curiosity and our interest in the world, and our interest in consuming everything in the world that interests us, right? And certainly like these resources that we consume are useful to us.
And so the problem with AI for us as people is the problem with being a person, I think.
Anne Helen Petersen: Yes. I found myself kind of… I've had a lot of these conversations with myself about like both I don't wanna short-circuit my own processes because I think that they are valuable in allowing me to think the way that I want to think and write the way that I wanna write, and that's why I've turned off all of the AI results on Chrome.
But when I did that, it also short-circuits Chrome's ability to do simple math for me. So you used to, like when I had the settings on, I was able to just like where you would put in the website name, you could just put in some numbers. You could put in like a big sum or like a multiplication task or something like that, and it would spit it out for you And I am so annoyed that that is gone.
Like, it adds these extra steps into my life, and every week or so I'm like, "Should I turn those controls off so that I can get the calculator?" Right? And no, I should not. Right? Like, I should not do that, but I find essentially separating myself from my personal ethical stance for convenience.
I'm trying to separate the conversation instead of keeping it unified.
Vauhini Vara: Yeah. It's very human.
Anne Helen Petersen: Feels very human to me.
Vauhini Vara: I use DuckDuckGo which is an alternative to Google. And so the thing... And I think it's important, and I think I do a version of what you're doing where you make it harder for yourself to do the easy thing of using the AI or using Google. So for me, in my browser, I change the default search engine to be DuckDuckGo. So if I go to that browser line to search something on the internet, it's automatically gonna search for it in DuckDuckGo. But I bring it up because DuckDuckGo, I'm sorry, it just isn't as good as Google, unfortunately.
And so I find myself searching for things on DuckDuckGo and not finding what I need, and then reverting to Google, like going and typing google.com to get to Google. Or my son, who's 11, if he's searching for something, he'll search for it in the search bar. He'll get the bad DuckDuckGo results and be like, "Ugh, Mom, like you need to switch this back to Google." And then he'll go and type in the word google.com and look for what he needs.
Anne Helen Petersen: Yep. But it is, like it's just trying to put, what's the word? A governor almost on our own impulses.
Vauhini Vara: Yes. Yeah.
Anne Helen Petersen: Ugh. Okay, we have two questions from... we actually got a ton of questions from teachers, which at once shows that we have a lot of teachers and educators and academics in the audience.
But also I think that the classroom is one of the places where we see a lot of this conflict between creativity and AI use playing out right now. So we're gonna play two of them back to back. The first one is from Dana.
Diana: I teach a college English course on writing personal essays. It's a core English class, not just for aspiring writers.
One of my goals is to give all students a chance to exercise their creativity regardless of their field of study. Adapting this course to our current reality has been challenging. Any at-home writing assignment leads to a lot of AI-generated work. Not only is this forbidden according to the class rules, but the results are bland, formulaic, vague essays.
I put a lot of guardrails in place to minimize AI use, mostly by focusing on process, in-class drafts, peer workshopping, personal consultations with me, criteria concerning the level of specific pert- personal detail, and so forth I require students to use Google Docs so I can see version histories, and I keep a physical folder of each student's in-class work so I can see their essays develop.
I think students learn things about the creative process through this approach, but many final works still contain telltale ChatGPT speak and tired structures, signaling to me that they did not do the hard work of thinking through their ideas and wording on their own. Overall, I see no valuable contribution that AI can make when it comes to teaching young people how to think and produce creatively.
Am I missing something?
Anne Helen Petersen: And then the second is from Kat, and Melody's gonna read it.
Melody Rowell: I'm a professor at a design school. My undergrad kids are so lost in LLM usage, they don't even know how to come up with a creative concept, and they use Chat and Claude to generate ideas. This is something I'm working with them on.
Beyond writing papers for them, I'm curious what Vauhini sees the future of higher ed and specifically design school being like. Mo Gawdat says something about it being the student plus their AI agent being the norm, leveling the playing field and accepting the AI as part of the process. What do you think?
Anne Helen Petersen: Huge questions. I know. I mean, first of all, the description of all of the things that have to be put in place in the classroom to serve as guardrails against this inclination towards AI use feels very exhausting pedagogically. And it reminds me of this piece that I wrote a couple of months ago, which was basically like, AI keeps wasting my time.
Like, it's supposed to be making less work for me, and it's making a lot more.
Vauhini Vara: Yeah.
Anne Helen Petersen: And I think that you're seeing that to some extent in the classroom, 'cause I think we're at a hinge point in terms of how we're gonna continue teaching writing and creative thought. So where do these two questions lead you?
Vauhini Vara: I mean, I think there are so many different ways to approach this. I think a lot of the messaging that the kind of pro-AI messaging that educators are getting is coming from administrators, whether this is at the K12 level or at the university level. And a lot of the messaging that those administrators are getting is coming from technology companies.
And the reason for that is historically embedded. It's been… and by the way, I speak, this is drawing on my reporting for this article I mentioned, which was published in "Business Week" about AI making its way into schools. I was like, why is this happening? And it turns out, and this won't be surprising, I don't think, to a lot of the teachers who are listening, a lot of the educators who are listening, schools and universities for the past 20 years or so have turned technology companies basically into their tech advisors because they don't have, especially at the public K12 level, they don't have the budget to have trusted third-party individuals of their own who can advise on these issues.
So if there's some question about how to integrate technology or whether to integrate technology, the go-to thing to do is to call somebody at Microsoft or Google and say, "Hey, so what do you think about how I should do this?" And so…
Anne Helen Petersen: Hmm ...
Vauhini Vara: … with those technology company representatives as the trusted advisors inside K through 12 schools and also inside universities, it's inevitable that the marketing messaging from those companies finds its way into the administrators' minds and then into what they're telling teachers to do.
And I hear that especially in the second question from the design professor, because there's a suggestion that one of the messages the professor is hearing is maybe it's actually a positive thing to…
Anne Helen Petersen: Right. It's democratic.
Vauhini Vara: Yeah, it's democratic. I hear often people saying, "This is giving students the skills they'll need to use in the future in the workforce," right?
What I find really interesting about that is that this is a tried and true approach that technology companies have used in marketing their products. So over the years, tech companies have figured out that what you need to do in order to get your product into schools is to say like, the word speculative is often used in these contexts, which I find really interesting, that people sometimes say education is a speculative endeavor.
It's a speculative profession 'cause you are always training students for a world of the future, right? You've got kids or 20-year-olds in your classroom, and you need to imagine what the world is going to be and what they're gonna need. And so if you can plant this message that you know what the future is gonna be, and it's gonna be a future in which AI is dominant, then you can convince administrators who can then try to convince teachers, like, "There's this future that we know is happening.
In order to be successful in this, in that future, your students need to know X. In this case, need to know how to use AI products." The problem with that, of course, is that nobody knows what the future is gonna hold. Mm-hmm. There's some evidence that we're in an AI bubble maybe that's gonna burst- Yeah ... that the AI companies actually haven't found a way to be financially sustainable.
And so maybe there is no business model here. Maybe this technology, you know, will persist in some way but won't have the dominance that the technology companies predict it will. And if that's true, then it means that if you're teaching students to use these products and rely on them, you're actually doing them a disservice in preparing them for a world of the future. So that's like one thought exercise I like to keep in mind. To my answer to that first question about like is there any benefit to having AI be part of the creative process for students working on personal essays, for example, it's a somewhat of a simpler answer, but I would say that it is useful to be cognizant of like what communication, what the written word is, right?
It's never been a fixed thing. It always evolves. So to the extent that like chatbots and their language production is a part of how we experience language now, I do find it interesting and useful to ask whether there are ways to engage creatively with these products that sort of speak to the role of these products in our lives.
Anne Helen Petersen: Yeah.
Vauhini Vara: It's a really specific case though. So what I'm describing is not saying to a chatbot, "Hey, I'm trying to write an essay about my grandmother's death. Like, here are 10 details about what happened. Can you draft it for me?" That's not at all what I'm saying because that's not a conscious investigation of how these products function. It's just using these products to spit out some text that might be serviceable for you. So in that much broader context, which I think the person who asked the question is asking about, I struggle to see any benefit.
Anne Helen Petersen: Yeah. When I think of that prompt, right, like I have to write an essay about my grandmother, and here are 10 facts about her life and her death. What I would find interesting is exploring that space between, and you do this in Searches, like exploring that space between what it proffered and what my actual memories were.
And how were my prompts maybe imprecise. Maybe I was writing them in a way that did not actually reflect the feeling, or could not reflect my actual feelings about my grandmother, right? Like, so delving into those corners, that's a cool essay, but that's not what these students are using.
Vauhini Vara: That's right. So, yeah. And actually, it makes me think about Auburn's question and comment earlier actually, Anne. Because, when you describe that, something that comes to mind is like, and what would happen if the person who's writing that essay about their grandmother went to their best friend who also knew the grandmother, or their sister and said, "Here are the 10 things. Like, what comes to mind? What am I missing?" Right? Like, that's definitely gonna be a more fruitful, interesting conversation that's gonna lead to something generative for the writer than whatever ChatGPT has to offer.
Anne Helen Petersen: One thing that came up in other questions from educators is that some of the people who are shouting the praises of ChatGPT are people who already developed that creative muscle to even think of these two prompts that we thought of, right?
Like, these two different approaches.
Vauhini Vara: Mm-hmm.
Anne Helen Petersen: But if you have never had the space to develop that creativity, it's not as useful. Do you subscribe to that?
Vauhini Vara: I can see the logic in thinking about it that way. I think about how, for example, when I wrote that essay, “Ghosts,” right, where I was offering, I was writing something, and then it would fill it in, fill in the rest for me, and then I'd say to myself, "Oh, that's not right," and I'd delete it, and I'd do it again myself.
Basically, that process was me having the critical faculty to see that what this product was producing did not reflect my own self-expression. And I think I'm only able to do that with 25 or whatever years of experience as a writer.
Anne Helen Petersen: Right.
Vauhini Vara: Um, I think that would've been difficult, maybe impossible, for me to see when I was 18 or 25, you know, and still developing as a writer.
That said, I think the value of having these products express things for us or, like, quote unquote, "Help us see things that we might not have seen about our own self-expression," is like there's potentially a value there, but there's a huge potential cost having to do with the way in which the use of these products can, like, corrupt our own way of thinking.
It can maybe sidestep investigative routes and creative routes that we might have gone down if we hadn't been in conversation with a chatbot. Not to mention, as Aubern again mentioned, these overarching costs, having to do with environmental resource use -
Anne Helen Petersen: Yep.
Vauhini Vara: - labor exploitation, and so on, that sort of, just naturally comes with any use of these products.
Anne Helen Petersen: I wanna pick up on the part, the democratizing creativity part, because we got a question specifically about that. It's from Jordan.
Jordan: Apparently, they were talking about democratizing creativity through AI at a recent design conference. I find this framing interesting because so far, capital D design has been protected, but creativity in general is something that anyone can try.
Why would it need to be democratized? Maybe this points to a general shift in understanding creativity as being more about the thing created and not the process of creating or maybe it's an additional element of bread and circus trying to throw the average Joe a bone while they install their surveillance apparatus at great expense to our communities.
What do we think they're attempting here?
Anne Helen Petersen: I love this look. Like, it's really a rhetorical analysis, and it's quite good. Also just the use of bread and circus to describe democratizing creativity. What do you think of that phrase? What is it trying to do?
Vauhini Vara: I mean, it's funny, I will say with every single one of these questions, the analysis embedded in the question is so valuable. I'm like, let's just do whatever we need to do to get that analysis on air so people can hear it.
Anne Helen Petersen: Yeah. That's oftentimes the case, yes.
Vauhini Vara: Yeah. I mean, I think there is a real desire on people's parts to be part of an artistic or creative discourse. I think that's real.
Anne Helen Petersen: Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Vauhini Vara: I think that is being exploited by tech companies who see that desire. I don't think it's just marketing messaging because I wrote this article about AI in the romance writing world.
Anne Helen Petersen: Oh, yeah.
Vauhini Vara: Yeah, yeah, yeah ... and I talked to some people who never considered themselves writers, but really wanted to be involved in romance writing, and found that by using AI products, they were able to produce these texts that they felt were partly their own that they wouldn't have been able to produce without AI.
At least one person who I included in this article I wrote described anti-AI sentiment when it comes to creative production as being ableist. Because the idea being that one might have a disability that makes it difficult to express oneself in conventional ways, and the use of AI could allow a kind of expression that might have felt inaccessible.
Which I find really fascinating, you know? And I think the fact that people feel that way requires that we kind of sit with it rather than dismiss it. I don't think it's just propaganda.
Anne Helen Petersen: Agreed.
Vauhini Vara: And yet it raises questions, I think. I think the thing to do is maybe try to dismantle what we are prioritizing when we talk about creative production.
Like, I think it probably is a very real thing that our creative industries are ableist, and racist, and sexist, and put up barriers that make it difficult for people to enter who are not from, like, the mainstream majority culture or background. But I think maybe the next question is, well, how can we dismantle that so that there is more varied self-expression, including from all kinds of people, rather than saying, "Let's keep things as is and just use chatbots so that people who don't come from that background are able to, quote unquote, able to produce text or images that conform with what we've decided is okay."
Anne Helen Petersen: Yeah. And I think of, create - you used the phrase creative production, and I think much of the goal with using AI in these forms is to up your creative production, right? Produce more. Have more creativity. And I often go back to these scenes in Mad Men where Don Draper is just going to the movies, getting drunk at lunch and sleeping, but taking naps, walking around, not doing much, and then comes up with a smart idea or a clever idea, whatever it is, right?
And the way that we just completely, like our work, all, so much of our work is trying to compress creativity, trying to make it into something that can be optimized in some capacity. And so I hear democratizing creativity, and I hear optimizing creativity. And it can't be... Like, what, what I'm hearing too is just the eagerness to adopt these tools is a frustration that there isn't enough time in our lives with our hungry jobs, and our intensive parenting practices, and our precarity, and the constant messaging from all sides.
There isn't enough time for creativity, but we want it because it is human.
Vauhini Vara: Yeah.
Anne Helen Petersen: And so we are turning to these tools.
Vauhini Vara: Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, we don't live in a culture that values the novel that took 13 years to write like mine did, you know? Or makes it easy to do that. And I agree fully that that what these products facilitate is being able to produce images or texts quickly which has almost no relation to what it means to make art.
Anne Helen Petersen: Have you thought a little bit, or I know you have thought about this, but I think about the vis- we haven't talked about the visual components of design much, and there's just this look, right? Like, you can recognize an AI design. Like, if someone's trying to make a little logo for their company or to announce an event in their local community, and I can always see it, and I know that the person doing that is like, "Isn't it amazing that I can make this logo without any design skills? Like, I'm just excited that I can have a kinda cool logo that's right here."
But then I think about like, what if that person just wrote it on a piece of paper? Like, kinda cool and it was maybe not that beautiful or symmetrical or proportional, but it would have Benjamin's aura.
There would be aura to the object in some way, right?
Vauhini Vara: Yeah.
Anne Helen Petersen: But sometimes though I'm like, am I just an old person who is going to go down yelling at these AI images until, for the rest of my life? Or, yeah, what do you think?
Vauhini Vara: I mean, I think the bigger question you're getting at is, like, what is any of this for? What is the purpose, right?
Anne Helen Petersen: Yeah.
Vauhini Vara: And I think, like, to be any- but any animal, to be a human animal or any other kind of animal is about, part of the diversity of what it means to be alive, right? And there's something really unnatural, I think, about the dominance of these products that are kind of homogenizing everything about what it is to be human, right?
It's just not in keeping with what it actually feels like or means to be a person, I think. But it's easy. It's easy, and right now it's cheap, and we have busy lives, and we don't have the resources we need to do things as beautifully as we want to, right? And so the temptation makes a lot of sense. But there's a real cost, you know? I mean, I agree that that hand-drawn sign is always going to be better. Or it makes me think of my son, in his fifth grade class, came home one day and was like, "Hey, we're using AI in school." And I was like, "Wait, what? How are you using it?" And what they were, it was Halloween, and they were writing these little stories about a pumpkin. And so they were supposed to put these prompts in Adobe Firefly, which makes AI-generated images, describing the scenes, the pictures that they wanted to accompany their stories.
And there was this standard, this fifth grade apparently standard that this was supposed to map to, which had to do with describing things with specificity.
Anne Helen Petersen: Ah. Interesting...
Vauhini Vara: And this comes back to Auburn's point, though, because you look at something like that and you're like, "Oh, okay. Like, I can see what they're going for there," and yet what happened, what would happen if in order to meet that standard, you had the students actually be in pairs with their friends and they had to describe the image to their friend, and their friend would draw it, right? Like, because when we're talking about describing things with specificity, the reason that standard exists in the first place presumably is so that we can communicate better with each other in the world as people, right? And so why not try to see it in practice, like how you can do that with an actual other person in the world?
So ultimately, I'm very proud to say, I don't know if it was my doing, but they canceled the assignment and they just had the students illustrate their own pumpkin stories. Which my son was so annoyed at me about, obviously. But, like, I loved my son's pumpkin story with his own, janky pumpkin drawings. Like, it would've been horrible to have that same clever, creative story of my son's with these AI images, you know?
Anne Helen Petersen: No. So boring. Well, and I'm a very poor drawer in every capacity, and it was very useful for me to be bad at something.
Vauhini Vara: Yeah.
Anne Helen Petersen: And I think that that's one of the things, and obviously, this goes back to the ableist argument in some ways. Like, I don't think that I understand how difficult it can be to feel so bad at something that you're excluded from society in some way or from the workplace, those sorts of things.
But, sometimes there are things that you have to get better at in order to… or you just have to have the experience of not being very good at it.
Vauhini Vara: Yeah. I mean, that's what it is to just be in the world. Absolutely.
Anne Helen Petersen: I know.
Vauhini Vara: And, I mean, there's something beautiful, again, thinking about ourselves as humans and other animals as being part of a broader world.
Like, there's something kind of lovely about the fact that some of us can do certain things beautifully and well.
Anne Helen Petersen: Yeah.
Vauhini Vara: Others can do other things beautifully and well. And if I am writing a pumpkin story but I don't know how to draw, which I don't either, like, maybe I ask my best friend who's really good at illustrating to do the pictures for my pumpkin story, and then we'll have made the pumpkin story together, you know?
Anne Helen Petersen: Yeah. Well, this makes me feel like, I keep going back to the book that I'm working on right now, which is about community and friendship and you used to, if you couldn't draw and you needed to make a sign for an event that was happening, you were like, "Oh, but Susan can draw."
Vauhini Vara: So true, yes.
Anne Helen Petersen: And Susan has to draw all this stuff, but maybe you do a nice thing for Susan. Like, maybe you watch Susan's kid for a little while, while she draws this thing for you.
Vauhini Vara: Yes.
Anne Helen Petersen: There was just a more almost bartering of creative skills that I think…
Vauhini Vara: Oh, that's so true. It's so funny, this totally connects to your work on community and friendship.
Anne Helen Petersen: Like, talk to people.
Vauhini Vara: Yes.
Anne Helen Petersen: Okay, our next question is about something that we talked about at the beginning of the episode, which is about the difficulty of having these discussions online, or just having these discussions broadly. So this comes from Whitney.
Whitney: I'm an artist who works at an arts organization, and I'm also politically left.
I interact with both of those communities online and in person, and I find that the discourse around AI is really different depending on where I have the conversations. Online, there's absolutely no gray area about AI. People won't even consider discussing potential uses for organizing projects or tasks, and no one wants to admit that they have dabbled with it for fear of cancellation In person, however, I'm talking to all sorts of creative and progressive people who are using AI to help them streamline the tasks that they're not really good at and organize projects, and otherwise make it possible for them to do the part of life that they are good at.
So what do you make of this divide? Once again, it feels to me like online community is more interested in purity tests than giving people the benefit of the doubt or exploring nuance.
Anne Helen Petersen: How do you think “Ghosts” would be received if it was published right now instead of when it was? Ooh.
Vauhini Vara: Yeah, I mean, it's such a cool… I love that question because I've noticed that too. And I always find it interesting and surprising, like the disconnect between what people disclose in online spaces or in their own writing versus what they say privately in conversation. It's making me think of something I posted about something problematic about AI, and then this bookseller in Seattle reposted it and said, like, I think it was in response to a post of mine, like, "Oh, it's really rich that this writer who uses AI in her work is, like, complaining about AI," you know, which I think is on the one hand fair, but on the other hand, doesn't account for the way in which I'm hoping to actually critique AI with the work itself, you know?
Anne Helen Petersen: Totally, totally.
Vauhini Vara: So, I've certainly experienced that myself. And I don't wanna, I think that, that's a relevant, I think it's a great criticism.
If somebody reads my book and is like, "Listen, this writer is critiquing AI throughout the book. Also, AI-generated material appears throughout the book." I don't think that the benefit of this book is worth the cost, right? Like, I don't think that this book pulls it off, or I don't think even if it pulls off some things, I don't think it's worth it.
I really like that critique. I think it's a really interesting critique, but it wasn't the critique that this person was making. And so, I think the internet, because of algorithms which amplify anything binary or polarizing are always, the internet is always, social media's always gonna be a place where very black and white opinions or polarized opinions are gonna be amplified.
And I think, I don't know, this is gonna be a very blanket statement to make. I wonder if you agree, Anne, but I think binary views of things are almost never the most interesting ways to look at things as artists or journalists or creative people.
Anne Helen Petersen: Yep.
Vauhini Vara: And so I'm always very skeptical or suspicious of anything that's like black and white X statement about AI in either direction, you know?
I always wanna know where the nuance is.
Anne Helen Petersen: Yeah. Same. And I think the algorithms have only become worse, in terms of surfacing… like once, whether it's on Threads or it's on like TikTok or whatever, you find yourself in the hole and the hole keeps getting deeper.
Vauhini Vara: Yeah.
Anne Helen Petersen: And I've found the most interesting conversations that I've had about AI have certainly not been online.
They have been with quote unquote "normies" who just talk to me about what they're seeing in their workplace, and and they talk very frankly about like, "This thing that's being pushed on us is stupid. And that's just, they're trying, that's just our organization trying to seem modern and throwing around AI stuff."
And then I talk to other people who are like, "This is a technology that is like, this has been a sticking point in the way that we have worked for such a long time, and this is simplifying it." And we have to figure out like, especially my friends who are lawyers, they're like, "What's the future of paralegals?
Like, what are we gonna do?" Like, this is a foundational component of the way that we have done work for so long.
Vauhini Vara: Yeah.
Anne Helen Petersen: And they are people who we love and that have been parts of our lives and parts of our workplace. Like, what is that future? And they're thinking about it. And I think it's not as simple as like, "Oh, we're just gonna cut costs and get rid of all the paralegals."
And they're also incredibly wary of hallucinations, in part because there are consequences for citing cases that don't exist.
Vauhini Vara: Yeah. I'm thinking about, I have a really close friend who runs a regional office of a nonprofit that is doing really, really important and super under-resourced and politically challenged work in the world right now.
Anne Helen Petersen: Yeah.
Vauhini Vara: And this friend sometimes uses AI for things like grant applications and reports on how resources are being used. And going back to Auburn's framing about cost and benefit, I think it's really interesting to think about a use case like that, that's a little more complex and confusing to talk about than like…
Anne Helen Petersen: Yep.
Vauhini Vara: Some big car manufacturer getting rid of all these jobs because they're using AI. Like, what does it mean for my friend who's working, you know, 60 to 80 hours a week to do really, really important under-resourced, politically challenged work, to use AI to generate a report that might have taken 10 hours and is now taking one hour of her time, when now she can use the other nine hours to do really important direct service work that she otherwise wouldn't have had the time for, right?
How does that affect that cost-benefit analysis? And I don't have an answer to that question, but I think those case studies are trickier and more interesting to grapple with than the more obvious ones.
Anne Helen Petersen: Yeah. There's a question that we don't have enough time for it, but that I thought was really interesting.
It was from a sculptor who said like, "In order to do my creative work, in order to have those expanses of time to do the physical work, like the thing that absolutely makes me feel human, the thing that I love, and the thing that is my job, I use AI for like some of my grant writing."
You know, basically the stuff, the stuff that historically either people had rich people who funded them to be able to do, or they came from money, or they had wives that did it, right? Like, they had people who did this work for them so that they could focus on the creativity. And that, to me, is also another one that makes, that I wanna rattle around in my brain and be like, how are we thinking about this?
Vauhini Vara: Yeah. Interestingly, I've been on the other side of that recently in a way because I'm reading applications to Hedgebrook, the residency up there near where you live, Anne.
Anne Helen Petersen: Right, right.
Vauhini Vara: And there have been very few applications that have sort of triggered my AI radar, but there have been a few where the language of the residency application reads AI-ish to me. And I think to myself okay, like, this person was saving time. Like, applying to residencies isn't a core part of their work. They're writers. However, I do read it differently, and it does not carry the power that something that reads as written by a real person has, you know?
Anne Helen Petersen: Totally. And I think of that all the tautology of students writing papers that are made with AI, and then teachers have too many papers to grade, so they start grading using AI. So it's basically, like, AI writing papers for AI. Like, how you get into this weird space, and like, is this the future of grant writing?
Vauhini Vara: Mm-hmm.
Anne Helen Petersen: Like, is it computers writing grants that then computers will sort through the grants to decide who gets the grants? Like, and how will they learn to talk to one another in terms of surfacing that? And what are the weights and balances that we are maybe not perceiving in terms of how the computer will perceive that?
Vauhini Vara: Totally. And what are the biases that are ingrained in that kind of approach, right?
Anne Helen Petersen: Yep.
Vauhini Vara: That is maybe trained to prioritize certain historically mainstream ways of expressing oneself or…
Anne Helen Petersen: Totally.
Vauhini Vara: Yeah.
Anne Helen Petersen: Or just, what if you chose not to use AI to write your grant application, and it just gets thrown out with the bathwater because it's like…
I use that phrase baby with the bathwater because our last question is about throwing the baby out with the bathwater, but also about baby names. I love this question. It's from Kellyanne.
Kellyanne: "I am the most anti-AI person you could imagine. Am I throwing the baby out with the bathwater?" Yesterday, my brother said, "This is a job for AI," as we were jokingly predicting my other brother's next baby name based on his current kids' names.
I feel instant revulsion when somebody suggests AI to me, especially for a task that is imagination, family, and love-centered. But am I wrong? He's probably right that AI would be better able to synthesize the names that are similar in popularity and style to what my brother has already chosen. I still feel that revulsion.
Is there actually a place for it in our lives? How do we continue to exclude it in the ways that matter and are meaningful without becoming an insane Luddite?
Anne Helen Petersen: This comes back to Auburn's question, don't you think?
Vauhini Vara: Well, something I love that's inherent to this question actually, and this connects to your work also, is what the question is actually telling us about the values and interests of the person asking the question, right?
So this is like two siblings talking about a third sibling who has some kids…
Anne Helen Petersen: Like gently razzing them a little bit, right?
Vauhini Vara: Right, yeah.
**Anne Helen Petersen:**Like it’s a little bit of intimacy, yeah.
Vauhini Vara: Yeah, exactly. Like there's gonna be another kid. They're trying to figure out if they can guess the kid.
So there's so many potential dynamics here. Maybe it's like these two siblings who are thinking about their other sibling who is either very conventional or very unconventional or…
Anne Helen Petersen: Yep.
Vauhini Vara: … names every kid after another relative that they know or something like that, right? There's like something very specific to that family and the family dynamics inherent to that conversation. Maybe it's also that each of the siblings are having this subconscious sibling rivalry dynamic where they're like, "Ooh, which of us knows this other sibling of ours better," right? Like which of us…
Anne Helen Petersen: Yeah, yeah.
Vauhini Vara: … can use the names of the existing kids to figure out what the next one is. If we each come up with one, who's gonna win, right? What does that say about our relationship with our other sibling? What does it say about our relationship with each other? And so everything that makes that question about predicting the next name interesting or valuable have to do entirely with the requirement that it's the people in the conversation who come up with the guesses of the names, right? Like it ends up actually being meaningless if ChatGPT comes up with it because ChatGPT has nothing to do with this family dynamic, right?
Anne Helen Petersen: Yeah.
Vauhini Vara: Yeah. So in a context like this, that's the thing that most arises for me to comment on, right? It's like, well, why are we doing the things we're doing in the first place?
And in something so intimate as this family conversation about baby names, it seems so obvious to me that there isn't that obvious a place for AI.
Anne Helen Petersen: Yeah. And I love, I mean, like a lot of these questions, the analysis is in the question, so…
Vauhini Vara: Yeah.
Anne Helen Petersen: I feel instant revulsion when somebody suggests AI to me, especially for a task that is imagination, family, and love centered, right?
Like, those are the places where I think that there is nothing wrong with feeling that revulsion. And the task is, in a society, how do we express that without being like the killjoy that is always like, "No." Like, there, and I think there are ways. It'd be, you could say like, "No, put your phone away."
Like, "Let's just come up with a couple more."
Vauhini Vara: Yeah.
Anne Helen Petersen: You know?
Vauhini Vara: Or like use it as an interesting… to the extent that we were talking earlier about using AI as critique, right? Which is something that I think about a lot in my book. Like, what happens if the questioner says to her brother who says, "Hey, why don't we ask ChatGPT?"
Like, "Okay, I dare you. Like, ask ChatGPT, but don't tell me what it says. I'm gonna come up with my own list, and let's see what happens." "And then let's see what happens when we talk about this as a family. Like, how does it make us feel," you know?
Anne Helen Petersen: Yeah. Like, what if they showed the list to their brother, right?
Like, after the baby was born or something like that. Like, that's another funny thing to do.
Vauhini Vara: Yeah.
Anne Helen Petersen: But how do you feel in scenarios like that when someone's like, "Well, is using AI for a joke in this kind of kidding scenario, is that worth-" Using the resources, you know?
Vauhini Vara: Yeah ...
Anne Helen Petersen: Is that worth it?
Vauhini Vara: Yeah. Well, I mean, the reason, the reason I suggested an answer like that is because it then allows the person asking this question with the revulsion to not use AI, right? Like this person is not participating in a decision to use AI. Yep. I also just to, for the record, I also would not consider that a use of AI that would feel worth the cost to me.
Anne Helen Petersen: Yeah.
Vauhini Vara: However, people are allowed to make their own decisions about how they use technology or whatever. So we could imagine a world in which rather than saying to the brother, like, "I'm gonna disown you as my brother if you use AI"- right? To say, like, "Listen, you're gonna do what you're gonna do. Like, go ahead and do what you're gonna do," and then potentially use that as an interesting rhetorical moment, right? Or just let the brother do what he's gonna do, explain their own reasons for not wanting to do that, and, and let it go, right? But it allows a kind of integrity on the part of the questioner where they don't have to be part of the like, "Okay, now we're using AI."
Anne Helen Petersen: Well, and I think it brings us to something we touched on a little bit earlier, and that I think a lot of us have learned over the course of the last 10 plus years, which is that shame is not a an effective rhetorical device.
Vauhini Vara: Yeah.
Anne Helen Petersen: Like, if you want someone in your life to think a little bit more about the way that they are using AI, telling them that they're killing the planet or that it's making you stupider, those things are not going to change their minds.
If anything, it's going to make them more resistant to thinking more deeply about it because it has been a place where they have encountered other people shaming them, and they have to harden their position in order to justify their use. So I think ways that you can open up the conversation about it, to talk a little bit about why you feel the way that you do or, and not in a hectoring way, right?
Just in a, when it's imagination, family, and love centered, like these are things that I wanna keep imagination, family, and love centered and not deflect that.
Vauhini Vara: Yeah. And by the way, to be clear, and you know this, Anne, because you read my book, but some listeners might not, I write about using chatbots.
I write about how I sometimes use them, and in a way that isn't about critiquing these products right? And part of the reason I do that, and I do it with respect to other things too, so I critique social media, and then I say I use social media. I critique Google, and I talk about using Google.
I critique Amazon, and talk about using Amazon. In some ways, that's the subject of the book. It's like, for me, the subject of the book is like this back and forth between reading a chapter where I'm critiquing something and then seeing a chapter where I'm actively using it. And my goal there, in some ways, was a rhetorical goal.
My goal was to show that hypocrisy in myself that I hoped readers would also see reflected in them. And so, you know, I wanted people to read the book and feel like, "Oh, okay, it's not just me." Like, I feel less alone because this person is enacting this thing on the page that I'm also familiar with.
But I'm also hoping that in putting myself in this hypocritical, maybe even villainous role, I'm inviting readers to see that in themselves, right? And so that way it's not me sort of shaking my finger at a reader and saying like, "All these things are horrible. If you're using them, you're horrible," because I'm using them too, right?
It's more this rhetorical move of saying like, "Hey, all these things are horrible. I'm still using them. Maybe you are too. Isn't this horrible?" Right?
Anne Helen Petersen: Well, and also an invitation for introspection, which I think…
Vauhini Vara: Yes.
Anne Helen Petersen: … great art asks of us, and hopefully that's what this podcast has done for others.
Not that this podcast is like great elevated art, but it is an invitation for introspection. So yeah.
Vauhini Vara: Absolutely. No, I agree, and I really appreciate the conversation, and I feel like we have, hopefully - we'll see what Auburn says in the comments.
Anne Helen Petersen: Yes, Auburn, please, thank you so much.
Vauhini Vara: Auburn, like the guiding spirit of this conversation hopefully agrees that like we've been able to sort of sit with that nuance together.
Anne Helen Petersen: If people wanna find more of you on the internet, where can they find you?
Vauhini Vara: I am on social media only on Bluesky, where I'm @vauhinivara, my full name. And I have a website, which is vauhinivara.com.
Anne Helen Petersen: Thank you so much for joining me today. It was just such a pleasure.
Vauhini Vara: This was really nice. Thank you again for having me.