Google's sketchy AI

2026-01-22

You've all noticed that Google is a bit shit lately, right? You get AI answers instead of decent search results, and for me at least it always sends me to Reddit where there's more AI shit.

Quite a few of the bloggers I follow have been talking about how they are extracting themselves from the services run by the big tech companies, for all sorts of reasons to do with risk, privacy, social justice and so on. This post is just another reminder that maybe using stuff from Google et al is not such a great idea.

This story is kind of funny, but it's also very sobering.

We were in this meeting today, me, Moises, Ben and we were joined by River who guessed the Zoom room ID and joined us. We were working on this presentation, only as you see here in this screenshot the slide notes were not showing up for Moises.

(The bottom of the page where there is normally some stuff is just a void)

Not in Safari, not in Chrome, and not in Firefox. I was all, like "Works for me" in the tab I'd had open all week, and wondering if it was a recent permissions change I'd made. But no, turned out it didn't work for Ben or River, and if I opened the presentation in a new browser session it didn't work for me either.

And then River said - hey, it looks like it's something to do with this. He'd done the developer thing and opened the develop tools and had a poke around the screen and found this:

<div class="appsSketchyGenerativeaiNudgesCanvasNudgeSurfaceSoyContainer" id="canvas-nudge-surface-soy-container"></div>

This happens to be right before the speakernotes-container div - where, one assumes the speaker notes live.

<div id="speakernotes-container"> ... </div>

Yep there's a an element in Google's office product used by millions of people with a class called appsSketchyGenerativeaiNudgesCanvasNudgeSurfaceSoyContainer. May contain traces of sketchy generative AI but least it's lactose free :-). The fact that it's a class indicates that it might be used in more than one place, so who knows what else it is breaking.

You can't make this stuff up. You need a SketchyGenerativeai for that, though to be fair there are actually other bits of the interface that have sketchy in the name - maybe it doesn't mean shitty in this context?

And then Ben said if you delete that class the page works again. The little handle reappears and you can drag it up to see your notes.

The little handle:

And we're back:

Now we do pay for this Google stuff at work and I use it for all sorts of things and I also pay. But I am thinking that this is a very good reminder to get thinking about how to move all our stuff to services that are not, you know, turning to shit.