Articles by Vauhini Vara

Vauhini Vara has been a reporter and editor for The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and The New York Times Magazine. She has authored The Immortal King Rao and This is Salvaged. You can find her book Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age here.

The Intractable Courtship Between AI Language Models and Writers

August 21, 2026

The much-discussed arrival of AI-generated text into the literary realm has cast us into a new era of authorship: nothing you publish online is free from its radar, ever. In this excerpt from her investigative book Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age (HarperCollins, 2025), Vauhini Vara writes about how the accessibility of these tools, trained on huge data sets but constantly trawling the internet for more, brought an avalanche of ‘polished’, writing.