a eulogy for google

file under "bill is grouchy about something trivial"

Some years ago, never mind how long precisely, I wrote a review of a videogame, and I wrote this review in Twine, which is an open-source interactive fiction tool which was very much hip and cool in Videogame Circles in 2012 or so. I’d link to it but I let the old website (www.ontologicalgeek.com) lapse a bit ago and while I’ve saved all the data I haven’t done the work of restoring the website back into legibility.

The review was called “A Eulogy for Kuranes” because it was, well, look: I was, I think, 22. It was a bit dramatic and silly, because it was about the videogame it was reviewing (Porpentine’s Howling Dogs) and it was also about being lonely and adrift and frightened in the world and playing too many videogames, and Kuranes is the name of a character from Lovecraft’s Dream-Cycle, and you know what? Don’t worry about it. The review is not actually what this is about.

I was feeling a little sentimental the other day, and I vaguely remembered that this review had gotten some small amount of attention, and I was curious whether any of the other blogs that commented on it at the time still existed. So I googled the title, in quotes: “A Eulogy for Kuranes.” Google showed me only one link, alas: a link to my wordpress site. The blogs of the other people who said nice things about my review appear to be lost to the mists of time, so you’ll just have to trust me that there were, at least, seventy thousand of them. But while looking at this dearth of results, I looked at the rest of the screen. Behold, above the link, this:

That’s right: without me asking it to do so, Google took my search input and decided it was a creative writing prompt for its built-in AI functionality, and so it wrote its best attempt at a eulogy for Kuranes, the character.

Let us acknowledge that Googling one’s own writing is sort of like Googling one’s name or namesearching on Twitter. We all probably do it, but it’s a disreputable and embarrassing habit and I would not ordinarily talk about it in public. Put that aside for now.

Do you remember those “If Google Was a Guy” sketches from CollegeHumor about a decade ago? Where eternally underutilized comedic character actor Brian Huskey reacted to people’s deranged and confused Google searches as though they were being said to an actual person? Imagine going up to a reference librarian, asking them about a book, and having them respond with a full tight five based on the title of the book you asked for. Not, like, one joke over the shoulder while the librarian looks up the title in a database or walks over to a card catalog; not an attempt to make a human connection via a shared interest; no, a full comedy routine, eyes locked with yours, pauses for laughter, a little bit of pacing to “explore the space,” a “thank you, you’ve been great” at the end. If someone did this to you you’d either call an ambulance or challenge them to a duel.

Note further that this perplexing and wasteful¹ attempt at Lovecraft fanfic appears above the search results. I know that years of skipping the ads to get to the search means that most of us have trained our eyes to ignore everything above the line break, but still: purely from a layout perspective, it appears that Google thought this dreck was the most important thing on the page. If this was an actual human being, it would be pitiful and embarrassing, like a barista throwing his screenplay at a director from behind the coffee counter, but it’s not. Google is not trying to publish this piece, or get a job as a writer, or trying to make me laugh. Some wire in its circuitry got crossed and it interpreted a search query as a prompt for creative writing, and so it spat this garbage out without any intentionality or thought.

I used to wonder what Lovecraft meant when he referred to Azathoth as a “Blind Idiot God,” but I’m realizing that he was describing a modern tech company. Nobody, including Google, wants their search engine to randomly freestyle unsolicited Weird Fiction pastiches. Yet it does so anyway, and there’s no way to stop it from doing this. I can’t, so far as I can tell, turn off Google’s LLM box that haunts the top of the search engine, balefully threatening to assault me with Vogon poetry every time I ask for “Thai restaurants near me.” This is Google, mind, not ChatGPT or Claude — were I using one of those services, I might well be asking it to gin up a little award-winning litfic story, if I was a bad person. But Google? Who wants to generate slop with Google? Why does Google know how to write bad fanfic? Why, when everyone claims this technology will either save or destroy the world, is it so goddamn annoying to use all the time?

Iä! Iä! The daemon-sultan Azathoth, whose name no lips dare speak aloud! Iä! The monotonous whining of the flutes; the maddening beating of vile drums; the whirling, staccato dancing of the tenebrous Other Gods! The ultimate nuclear chaos that forms the genesis and revelation of our reality! Iä, the Soul and Messenger of the Other Gods, the crawling chaos Nyarlathotep, cackling and watching his stock price rise despite the capering and writhing of all of us, caught in the vortex that is Azathoth! Iä!

1. It is my understanding that the environmental costs of LLMs are somewhat overstated when phrased in a literal watts-per-chatgpt-search kind of way; but nevertheless, generating this unasked for eulogy surely required some amount of power above and beyond just running the search, power that could have been better spent doing literally anything else.