search engine once gave us access to many viewpoints, diverse opinions, and alternative approaches to every topic. Now it serves up a single response and gives that ‘official’ opinion precedence over all others. Even worse, the quality of this ‘official’ response is just slightly better than a high school term paper, and far worse than a human-written encyclopedia entry. And that’s Google at its best now—a crappy encyclopedia. And often it’s far worse. Even an inferior encyclopedia wouldn’t replace historical images with AI slop. But Google does this constantly.