Google's Defin-ish-ions
Google’s relentless campaign to stuff its AI butlers—more C-3PO than research-librarian—into and atop every container on its user interface has already done much to damage the usefulness and credibility of the World’s Index. And perhaps the greatest crime committed in the course of this blitz has been the replacement of interactive dictionary definition modules with expandable walls of lexicographical purée.
When you used to type something like “invidious definition” into the search bar, Google would serve up a structured dictionary entry licensed from Oxford Languages, usually alongside synonyms, usage examples, etymology, and frequency. Now, in most cases, a Gemini window appears, and it slowly unfurls an invertebrate scroll of definISHion. The LLM frankensteins elements from multiple scrapeable entries into one, uneconomical, breathless suggestion. Reduplicative elucidation bleeds into usage into connotation into pronunciation video.
Sundar Pinchai’s viziers, who are management consultants by training, have replaced engineers in senior leadership across virtually all of Google’s core businesses. They’ve already handicapped Search (court documents revealed efforts to increase query volume by making results worse), and now they’re stripping out an important public service, replacing the world’s most accessible reference material with the best guesses of their sycophantic, in-house robo-concierge.
To what end? The generative model is being asked to solve a puzzle that has already been solved by OED. In his book “Unabridged”, Stefan Fatsis details how much care and scrutiny is paid to getting the entry for a word like vajazzle just right at Merriam-Webster. Gemini eschews this exacting method, in favor of its more expensive, non-deterministic, recombinant approach. It’s sorting all the puzzle pieces into the right zip code, pressing really hard until they click together (however imperfectly), and squirting the result back out at us with disinterest.
A curious querier used to be able to click-through to definitions-within-definitions or trace a word’s pedigree back to Proto-Indo-Aryan. Not anymore. We’ve progressed past the need to offer that service. Why poke around? Why interrogate how we’ve chosen to assign meaning over time?