Google has seriously leaned into AI enshittification lately

KETTLE Google I/O has ostensibly been an AI show for a few years running, but this year's announcements have taken the cake, which Google seems all to happy to let its users eat as it reshapes the web. On this week's episode of The Kettle, host Brandon Vigliarolo is joined by El Reg senior reporter Tom Claburn and open source …

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm looking at the fact that if Microsoft does _NOT_ follow Google then Microsoft might become the new defacto information gateway. Ironically whoever is _NOT_ harvesting AI results wins being that nobody cares about how the cake is made but still, whoever controls sugar is god of cake.

I think this will work for Google since the internet is now just 1 big advertising machine and/or spy tool. The small remaining 2 parts of it are political hate bating and celebrity/streamer style drama ragging. That is objectively backed up by every internet data analyst for any think tank campaign that can exist which is truly crazy but it also works amazingly for Google. internet_over(true);

[jake]

But ...

... As we all know, the cake is a lie.

[MachDiamond]

Re: But ...

"... As we all know, the cake is a lie."

That's OK, I prefer pie.

[SundogUK]

If you think the internet is just a "big advertising machine and/or spy tool" and "political hate bating and celebrity/streamer style drama ragging", you're doing it wrong.

[FF22]

"I think this will work for Google since the internet is now just 1 big advertising machine and/or spy tool. "

That's what they want you to believe, because then you won't resist the forced change, and will actually lean into it, making this very thing a reality. And they have obviously succeeded with you at that.

Like indiscriminate ad blocking on websites (on the false basis that they are all spying on you) is the exact thing that kills small independent websites, while allowing Google os Facebook to thrive (who will still be able to spy on you either way).

[ecofeco]

Lately?

Oh it's been quite some time now.

Eshitification has an exponential function, so it always look like more because it is more.

[jake]

In general ...

... whenever marketing starts making engineering decisions, enshitification is inevitable.

[DS999]

My definition of enshittification:

1) any decision designed to increase "engagement" by keeping you on the site longer by deliberately withholding from you what you want. Examples include Facebook not allowing you to see a chronological list of posts made by your friends and pages you follow, and Google not presenting best search results to your query but ones designed to earn them more money by making you click multiple links to find what you're looking for. This type of thing is only possible when you are operating as a monopoly or quasi-monopoly.

2) not allowing you to "own" a product, but making everything subscription based. Obviously that makes sense for stuff like streaming movies since there are always new ones coming out and so many older ones you could never possibly watch them all. But it has wormed its way into everything now, where even something pretty basic that doesn't require app updates or expensive infrastructure is subscription based. You used to be able to "buy" a weather app. You'd run it and it would show you the current weather and forecast, and since it is getting that stuff from the government service that your tax dollars pay for there is almost no running cost.

Now you have to pay a yearly fee, not because the weather apps are any better but because the developers got greedy and saw the general movement to subscription services so they jumped on board and are raking in the cash while doing almost no work on their apps (other than introducing ads to force you to pay more to reach a tier where you don't see them) and still don't have to bear the cost of generating forecasts or operating servers to deliver them.

What's sad about this one is that in theory it should not be possible in a market with competition for this to happen, but if "everyone else is doing it" then you feel free to do it too.

[Kurgan]

Everyone is doing it, that's the point

The issue here for the consumer is exactly that everyone is doing it.

Once everyone does it, the consumer has no choice.

Yes, we can just stop using weather apps, but can we stop using refrigerators, or cars? (or electric bikes, if you are a "green" kind of person)

Once every refrigerator, car, or bike you can buy has a screen that blasts ads 24/7 and requires a subscription to work, what can you do? And they (google et all) know this. If there is no choice, the sheep must comply.

And don't get me started on (legal) streaming services enshittification.

[DS999]

Re: Everyone is doing it, that's the point

The issue here for the consumer is exactly that everyone is doing it

Yes and this is a textbook example of a failing of capitalism - the profit motive is outweighing the competition that capitalism claims/promises that is supposed to reign in bad behavior. This demonstrates perfectly why regulation is required to address the market failures of capitalism.

The fact this sort of thing isn't regulated - and in fact (in the US at least) the capitalist class has taken more and more power over the three branches of government, as well as the press, and their "all regulation is bad" meme has penetrated the mainstream. Capitalism is perfect, requires no regulation, and to suggest otherwise makes you a socialist and/or communist. So rather than new regulation to address issues like this that weren't a problem a few decades ago, we are instead turning back the clock on even existing successful regulation addressing pollution in the water and air, and financial regulation added in the wake of financial crashes to prevent the same things from happening again.

Unless the ship can successfully be steered from the Trump/MAGA autocracy where corporations make the rules through a unitary executive with a powerless congress watching from the sidelines, courts allowing them to do anything they want and blocking those trying to stop them, and the media telling people comforting lies and giving them various "others" to blame for their problems, the US will rapidly become one of those "shithole" countries.

[MachDiamond]

Re: Everyone is doing it, that's the point

"Capitalism is perfect, requires no regulation, and to suggest otherwise makes you a socialist and/or communist."

It makes you a Rockefeller. The Robber-Barons of yore were nasty human beings and the impetus behind anti-trust laws. Un-regulated anything becomes a problem. I remember Burt Rutan advocating for regulations surrounding private space flight when working on Space Ship One. If everybody with the money and not quite enough brains were to start building spacecraft to sell rides to the public, there would be a load of deaths and the politicians would step in and just ban the whole thing, directly or through poor laws/regulations. Burt could see the risk that was inherent in the endeavor and idjits adding to that would become a problem for Scaled Composites.

Lots of money corrupts. It also lets those with lots of money to throw up barriers so anybody else that wants to sell in their patch will find a very high bar. This is why Meta is all for many "think-of-the-children" regulations. They have the size to have a department to handle that, but a smaller company can't afford it which keeps them out. Governments may be handing them a near monopoly.

[Someone Else]

Re: Everyone is doing it, that's the point

Well, I for one am pretty good at writing firmware. I'm by no means the only one, either. I see a large cottage industry is firmware hacking to "de-subscript" all this bullshit.

_{So it's "against the law". So what? I suspect this stuff will become so widespread, and so moveable, the coppers will be playing whack-a-mole with it until their blisters have blisters. (Or they give up)}

[Anonymous Coward]

modded firmwares?

Modding firmware is a (hard to do) possibility. Hard because everything is made to make it impossible to do it. And the law, too. Here I'm thinking of Nintendo level of using the law against anyone who dares scratch their glorious income.

While I'm sure anyone could take a internet of shit washing machine, remove the internet of shit enabled control board, and install a simple arduino (the old one, not the Qualcomm-enshittified new one) board with their own open washer firmware, I don't see a lot of people actually doing it.

And if someone was to make a small business out of selling non-shitty control boards for washing machines, I'm sure the manufacturer of those machines would sue the company selling them because of patents or DMCA or whatever legal shit they would come up with, Nintendo-style.

[FF22]

Re: Everyone is doing it, that's the point

That's a great excuse for being too lazy for standing up for your own rights and interests. But in reality it always starts with only one company doing it, not all of them. If most of their customers would just stop using their services and refuse to participate in taking advantage of them, then the next company wouldn't even try to do the same thing.

But most consumers are lazy and ignorant - and that's why more and more companies are abusing them - leading to a point where even the most conscious consumers indeed have no choise, and where the decent companies - who did not try to take advantage of their customers - have been driven out of business. But that's the endgame, not where it all started. It all starts with lazy and ignorant consumers, who prioritize short term convenience over long term defending of their interests.

[Wiretrip]

Re: My definition of enshittification:

"Examples include Facebook not allowing you to see a chronological list of posts made by your friends and pages you follow, and Google not presenting best search results to your query but ones designed to earn them more money by making"

It is precisely this kind of editorial control of what you see that makes the platforms *publishers* and not carriers! Instead of banning these to under 16s we should actually just remove their section 230 protection and treat them as totally accountable for their content.

[Bryan W]

Re: My definition of enshittification:

Ya'll complain about this stuff when alternatives that are not FAANG exist yet you don't use them. Do you use Blue sky? Do you use Mastadon? Do you use DuckDuckGo? Do you use Linux? Do you even fucking try? No, it's too hard so you take the easy route and open your anus to these people and say stupid shit like "there's no alternatives" and try to play victim while other.nicers devs with products you are asking for just go out of business.

[jake]

Re: My definition of enshittification:

FAANG has been depreciated this last half decade. Now we[0] use MANAMANA. For the uninitiated, that's Microsoft, Apple, Netflix, Alphabet, Meta, Amazon, Nvidia, and Adobe. And no, I do not feed the coffers of any of those companies.

_{[0] TINW}

[Brl4n]

it is fun to watch the "experts" dig their own grave though. The naysayers are always blasted for being Luddites and doomers but we're just wise. we've seen this all before because we read books about our past. It'll be interesting to see all the new businesses created that produce actual value for their customers instead of forcing anti-productive spy products onto customers that they don't need and never requested. Future is very bullish

[unbender]

"we read books about our past" - I read science fiction books in the 1970s that predicted people wearing clothes with the manufacturer's label on the outside, how we scoffed at the notion.

There's nothing new in pretending that the latest miracle in IT will make everything wonderful, history shows that the really clever bit is knowing when to jump off the bandwagon.

[MachDiamond]

"The naysayers are always blasted for being Luddites and doomers but we're just wise. we've seen this all before because we read books about our past."

There are plenty of examples both ways, but far more often, the more cautious wind up being correct. When power looms and automated spinning machines were being brought in, they would amplify what each worker could do so fewer workers were needed per factory, but there was lots of open market. With AI, it's jobs being entirely replaced a bit more than it being used to make each worker more efficient. It's also the rate of change that becomes a problem. The looms don't have to be ordered, built, shipped, installed and tested in a process taking some time. It's drones on long tables in an office one day and a "offices for let" the next.

[jake]

No company has ever been too big to fail.

Where are household names Burroughs, Sperry, Allied Signal, Philco, Amdahl, Remington Rand, DEC and ROLM?

All companies are ephemeral.

[Bebu sa Ware]

Re: No company has ever been too big to fail.

All companies are ephemeral.

Alias corporations which is just a fancy way of say "body" which rather indicates that all will end up as… well, corpses.

One might say the corruption of the body is incorporated from the very beginning, rather like original sin.

[Pete Sdev]

Re: No company has ever been too big to fail.

The average life span of today's multinational, Fortune 500-size corporation is 40 to 50 years.

Source: WEF.

There's other sources giving a similar figure, with data suggesting the average corporation lifespan is decreasing.

[Random as if !]

Simon & Garfunkel

Sound if silence lyrics, says it well

[Evil Scot]

Re: Simon & Garfunkel

I would have chosen Vincent.

"Perhaps they never will..."

[ComicalEngineer]

1% of advertising is effective ...

If only we knew which 1%.

In my case it's less than 1% and a goodly number of adverts actively put me off the product.

For example there is an advert currently on UK TV which features a couple whose sofa collapses followed by screaming and tantrums of the type enacted by 2 year old toddlers denied an ice cream. This is followed by said couple smirking and waving their credit card when the new sofa arrives. There is a similar ad for a car breakdown and a broken washing machine. These adverts ensure that I will never, ever, want this credit card.

Serious question - does anyone take notice of adverts on a website?

[jake]

Re: 1% of advertising is effective ...

Websites still bother with advertisements?

Huh. Who knew.

[Felonmarmer]

Re: 1% of advertising is effective ...

"Serious question - does anyone take notice of adverts on a website?"

Nope, or anywhere else. Aside from laughing at adverts on the radio that promise the earth and then quickly say everything they just promissed is excluded.

"Oooo that hurts!"

"Got a bad back Janet? I went to MegaMediCorp and signed up and they fixed my bad back instantly, you should go there!"

"Thanks Pam, I'll do that, my back is killing me."

...then at double speed...

"Existing medical conditions not covered. Terms and conditions apply. Must surrender your first born child to our chimney cleaning program."

It's not 1% of advertising though, it's 1% of views. So if they are all free after the initial costs, spam, spam, spam.

[Albert Coates]

Re: 1% of advertising is effective ...

"does anyone take notice of adverts on a website?"

Happily I never see any, thanks to Adblock Plus or uBlock Origin which are entirely effective. Also, no telly or subscription service, so my life is gloriously 100% ad-free. As a further discouragement to advertisers I have so little money that I wouldn't be able to buy anything anyway.

[jake]

Re: 1% of advertising is effective ...

I find commercials so distasteful that about 50 years ago, I built a little circuit to mute the radio in the vehicles for two minutes (the time can be adjusted) when I'm listening to baseball games. One touch of a button and it's nothing but beautiful road-noise for the prescribed time. Recommended.

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't help but think of "Die Hard"

"the circuits that could not be cut automatically are cut manually- you wanted a miracle Theo and I give you the FBI"

Would be a great strapline when Bing is the default search engine of 2030.

[xyz]

Re: I can't help but think of "Die Hard"

Oh Gawd NOOOOOOO. I used Google yesterday and it was shite, so I used Bing and it was shiter.

I see HotBot is still around.

[Mike 125]

Re: I can't help but think of "Die Hard"

> I used Google yesterday and it was shite

It's suddenly become completely unusable (in the last week) on Firefox with uBlock, on a reasonably powerful laptop. Should I be happy or sad...?

And is the Kettle discussion on audio somewhere...? Sorry, being lazy... Thanks!

[Bebu sa Ware]

Google has seriously leaned into AI enshittification

Fallen face first into the cesspit, I should have thought and long before the harpies of AI started befouling everything.

I normally Go to Ducky but one of the e-readers I use defaults to shit·woogle so I see the insane attempts at selling something that is so unrelated to the search terms (from the text) as to have come from another universe — not a sane one at that.

I was thinking about this on the bus today and recalled that not that many years ago, I could take some numbers from the chips on interface card whose function was completely unknown (to me or anyone I might ask), punch them into the Google search engine and in less that 15 minutes identify the card and its function.

Today I would probably be presented with a hundred advertisements for erectile dysfunction… no, now it is peptide weight loss medications^† rather than the expensive support IC for the early CCD devices in use at the time the card was manufactured. I shudder at the thought of what AI would serve up.

_{† I have no pressing need for either.}

[Claptrap314]

No mention of maps?

My city has a very nice freeway system looping around it. Six months ago, maps would make regular use of it. Now? Not so much. Too much compute to look too far "out of the way", and not enough computer science to identify & at least quickly try use of the freeways.

Ten years ago, it was the other way--freeways were way over preferred.

[Anonymous Coward]

Advertising blindness

I make real efforts to avoid advertising.

No commercial TV.

Ad blockers online.

No social media.

The more advertising tries, the more I ignore.

[Dinanziame]

This nugget right here

the whole internet AI thing took off when everyone saw a weakness in search and said, hey, we can provide something that will break Google's stranglehold

I want to point out that this sentence is the exact reason that Google is ramming AI down people's throat today. They didn't get where they are by letting others take away their users, so at the first sign that the users were leaving for chatGPT, they decided to out-chatGPT chatGPT. And they have more resources and more money.

[502 bad gateway]

On the plus side

I’m not looking at the web so much now which means my TBR list is diminishing faster than it was before… having just finished a Cory Doctorow title my eyes were naturally drawn to this automagically :)

[Taliesinawen]

Google’s closed AI loop

Google’s business model is based on other peoples works to feed its advert network. People using an AI overview can bypass this. The only way of maintaining dominance is to lock people into Googles own AI model.

[APro]

Chocolate factory enshitification.

When are Google going to learn that they're not the 300lb advertising gorilla in the room when it comes to AI. Throwing their weight around doesn't cut it like it used to.

The Chocolate Factory needs to look at itself from the search engine user's point of view.

It may look like chocolate,

but if it smells like shit,

and tastes like shit,

then it's most likely shit - or Hershey's!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Chocolate factory enshitification.

"Hersheys" and "shit" is a tautology surely.

[Stevie]

Bah!

Not only Google enshitified, but English when delivered over the internet.

When did Ebonics become the default language of teh intarwebs?

It be stupid.

[jake]

Re: Bah!

Using the term "Ebonics" in the way you just did is considered derogatory, if not outright racist.

Just sayin'.

[Albert Coates]

Re: Bah!

My brain turned that into Elbonics, as spoken by the Elbonians in Dilbert, so I thought everyone was being humorous until I looked it up, and agree.

[Stevie]

Re: Bah!

From Letterman, BITD, Top Ten list on the week the NYU professor tried to float a course in Ebonics:

Ebonics be a real language.