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Vauhini Vara has a complicated relationship, as do most of us, with the technologies that we have become so used to that we find it unthinkable to do without them. In this uniquely structured book, she shares stories from her early years with the internet in the 1990s, one chapter is filled with her Google searches over a five year period, another lists her ‘interests' as determined by X, her Amazon reviews (she decides that if she is going to order on Amazon, she needs to write a review thus making it harder for her - it does not curb her use), as well as her text to image prompts to Dall-E, Chat GPT and Bing Image Creator that reveal some stark biases.

 In one heartbreaking chapter titled Ghosts, a viral 2021 piece by Vara that appeared in The Believer, she shares her varying prompts to GPT-3 (a predecessor to ChatGPT) on the devastating loss of her sister when Vara was in high school, asking GPT to pick up from the cue and write about this extremely personal experience. She is surprised by some of GPT's output which is profound and could easily have been written by a human. On the other hand, what GPT produced was false and not her experience or what she wanted to say, leading her to refine her own words, to keep putting in more and more truth into the piece. As a seasoned writer, she found this helpful.

She feeds her progress on this book into ChatGPT, a few chapters at a time, seeking feedback. GPT obliges with commentary that does become quite bland and tedious as you read on. When you get back to Vara’s own words, the prose lights up again. In the end, Vara acknowledges that she is not about to give up using these various technologies, including perhaps the ever-evolving large language models. This might be the case with many of us. But the book certainly helps to highlight what we give up in return.