As AI is increasingly injected into every facet of our lives whether we like it or not, it seems we can only watch in a mixture of horror and frustration as so many of our once-reliable institutions become unusable husks of their former selves. Take, for instance, Google. The search engine’s PageRank algorithm was such a massive hit when it launched that it wasn’t long before contemporary competitors like WebCrawler, Lycos, and AskJeeves were swept into the dustbin of history and Google experienced brand verbification, its name now synonymous with online queries. Cut to the sorry state of affairs a quarter century later. Google Search is still the top website in the world in terms of page visits, but the bloom is clearly off the rose, and AI seems to be the source of customer dissatisfaction. After Alphabet began injecting artificial intelligence summaries at the top of its search results, users started noticing some weird answers that ranged from innocuously funny to downright dangerous. Google AI claimed that not a single country in Africa begins with the letter K. It also suggested one could improve a pizza recipe by adding glue to the cheese, and cited the health benefits of eating rocks. While many of these hallucinations have been reined in by Google devs, the AI just keeps coming. Last month, Google announced that even more AI was coming Google Search: Users have started leaving the search giant in droves. The exodus from Google Search can also be attributed to frustration with an apparent dip in search result quality, but it comes at a time when the masses are turning on AI writ large. It turns out that the brave new world being forced, top down, from the Silicon Valley bubble has little appeal to the average person. The prospect of eliminated jobs, endless slop made from stolen art, and a planet-destroying data center in every town somehow just isn’t appealing to the masses. It’s no wonder that one of Google’s competitors, DuckDuckGo, is leaning heavily into anti-AI rhetoric, hoping to establish itself as an AI-less promised land for those who yearn to be free.