At this point it would be easier to list the things that haven’t been enshittified by AI, but on a case-by-case basis, I can often avoid it. Yeah, I think Stripe and my health insurance and my internet provider are all forcing me to waste my time with an overly-sympathetic bot before I can talk to a human who can actually solve my problems, but I don’t interact with those services all that frequently. But one place I am forced to encounter AI tens of times a day is Google search, which accelerated its race down the drain back in May by “reimagin[ing] what Search can do with AI.” What this means is that my Google search results are now constantly trying to talk to me, and I fucking hate it.
In addition to the AI overview of results Google’s had for a while now, in which Google has eaten every website’s traffic in order to spit out over-simplified and frequently incorrect summaries, Google now frequently tries to use those summaries to funnel users into conversation with its bot. This is, I guess, an effort to seem “agentic,” AI’s favorite buzzword, but in practice mostly feels like when some guy won’t stop trying to talk to me at a bar. If I Google “What’s the weather in Charlotte in August?”, the AI overview ends with “If you'd like, I can help you plan a packing list or suggest the best times of day for outdoor activities in Charlotte during August.” When I recently had jury duty and on a whim tried to search if anyone had said if it was cold in the courtroom, Google asked “Could you share when your summons date is, or let me know if you need help finding accessible public transit routes to the courthouse?” When I search for tips for running in the heat, Google offers, “If you'd like, let me know 1) What is the temperature and humidity where you are? 2) How long or far do you plan to run? I can help you build a custom hydration and pacing plan for your run.”
One thing that bugs me about this is the assumptions these offers make about why I’m searching for something. This is by design–Google wrote in the blog post about its May update that the new search is “[d]esigned to anticipate your intent.” Google doesn’t push its bot for all searches, just, as far as I can tell, the ones that seem like they could be funneled down a solutions-oriented path. This isn’t necessarily a bad assumption–it is probably not general intellectual curiosity that has led me to search for the weather in Charlotte–but it bothers me with the way it inherently presumes my searches are transactional or can be forced to be. It stinks of capitalism, of the belief that my questions are simply roadblocks to be overcome in a quest for productivity.
And in this presumption, Google tries to narrow and direct my search behavior in a way that infuriates me as a library science nerd. No database is neutral, but they generally tend to stay out of your way. When you go to your local library catalogue, your desires (and your skill at using a particular repository) are what move you through, not the library catalogue nudging you toward what it thinks you should be searching for. Google, uninvited, attempts to steer me down the path it boldly presumes I mean to go, in the process inherently attempting to limit the information I encounter by pushing me toward itself instead of actual results. Google has always done this with its opaque and changing priorities, but that priority has changed from making websites conform to its whims to trying to force me to conform to its obsession with AI.
These presumptions of intent can also be maddeningly wrong and insulting. Recently, I searched for a phrase from the Irish language version of Heartstopper I’m reading, “focáil leat,” which I was 90% sure meant “fuck you” but wanted to doublecheck. Google got the translation right, but then it also offered “If you are looking for the vastly more common, polite, and friendly Irish greeting instead, you might be thinking of ‘Go n-éirí leat’ (pronounced guh nye-ree lyat), which means ‘Good luck!’”
This “If you are looking for” and “you might be thinking of” made me froth with fury. What in my search query could possibly have led Google to believe that’s what I was looking for, when the phrases are neither spelled the same nor mean the same thing? It read more like it was correcting me, as if it imagined I’m either very stupid or that someone had pulled a “póg ma thóin” style linguistic prank on me. It felt like Google had invented a narrative for my search to justify keeping me engaged with it, presuming I must be mistaken simply because it couldn’t otherwise figure out how to keep me talking. It’s sycophantic in the way of all AI, overly helpful while not actually having much to offer. Focáil leatsa (fuck you), Google search!
I’m aware that I’m falling into the AI trap of personifying these results, writing as if Google’s AI imagines and presumes. Google the company, of course, wants this too–it wants me to see my search results as a conversation with a helpful problem-solving buddy. The company has aims down the line to introduce actual agents that can search for you, jumping on the latest Silicon Valley obsession to basically make a version of Google Alerts that are worse for the environment. Maybe its current version of search is something of a test balloon for an eventual service it can charge for.
But the same way it drives me crazy when Stripe’s AI customer service tells me it’s so sorry, omg that must be so hard to hear about whatever utterly mundane, thoroughly unemotional issue I’ve brought it that day, Google search’s hollow facsimile of the human desire to help lays bare how badly its inventors misunderstand what regular people want and how we feel when we’re searching for information. (Full disclosure: I wrote my library school Master’s thesis literally about this, so it really riles me up!) It exposes how Google sees its users: helpless and intellectually lazy, longing for machines to solve our problems for us, unable to sit in the sometimes uneasy space of unknowing that motivates information searching in the first place. Shortcutting yourself out of this space–or, worse, letting AI do it for you–robs you of the chance to explore and discover, to let your search take you to new places and learn new things.
Or maybe all this just shows how desperate Google is to juice the interaction time with its AI. Ars Technica reported last week that Google “is actually spending so much on AI infrastructure that it has negative cash flow for the first time” in its history. When Google jammed AI into my business suite back in January 2025, I speculated to my Aftermath colleagues that it was mostly a ploy to make it look like people were using Gemini, by counting its non-consensual deployment as people actively using its offerings. I think the same can be argued of Google’s conversational search results, an effort to entice or trick users into engaging in order to show some kind of positive on whatever line graph the company needs to justify its disastrous spend.
But mostly, I just don’t want to talk to my fucking search results. I want information that I can explore and evaluate on my own; I want to see what’s out there and what experts say, not what a bot can regurgitate and poorly summarize. I don’t want so many of my queries to be presumed to be problems I’m looking to solve, and I especially don’t want AI to try to solve them for me. I do not want any agents; I do not want to tell Google the weather in my area or when I intend to leave for the courthouse (not that the company probably doesn’t know this already, via my weather app or Google maps). If it simply must provide AI results, I want to be able to scroll past them as quickly as possible and move on with my day. Take the hint, Google search. Leave me alone.
It's Hater Week here on Aftermath. This week we’re letting the hate flow through us by examining what it means to be a hater (and… a lover?), venting about some of our biggest pet peeves in games and life, and giving others a space to do the same.
