The Lost Art of Seeking

As Google scrambles to embed AI into Search, risking its $198B ad model a deeper crisis emerges: are we losing our intellectual curiosity as generative chatbots promise instant answers?

“I do not seek. I find,” Picasso once declared. Behind this cheeky assertion reinforcing his genius status lies a deeper insight: seeking and finding do not necessarily go hand in hand. Unlike Picasso, we often seek without finding. And sometimes, we keep seeking even after we’ve found, as in confirmation bias — that tendency to seek only what confirms our beliefs.

The painter thus opened a dizzying philosophical question: the relationship between seeking and finding is distinctly… cubist.

A maxim Google would do well to ponder. Not out of pure love for philosophy, but because it lies at the heart of its current existential crisis.

Until now, Google built its empire on the rational equivalence that seekingenables finding. The search function was the royal road to discovery: we found because we searched.

Yet today, the rise of generative AI reshuffles the deck, thrusting Google into a dangerous “Picasso moment.” For chatbots allow us to find without seeking, directly threatening Google’s halo effect. Hence last week’s reaction: Alphabet announced plans to supercharge its search engine by integrating “AI mode.”

But isn’t this letting the wolf into the sheepfold? By integrating AI, might Google jeopardize its $198 billion in ad revenue — firmly anchored to its search engine?

Google’s empire rests on the foundation it meticulously constructed: the illusion of transparency and the mirage of objectivity. Its genius? Using spartan, academic-inspired design to erect a Platonic temple of search: “We sell you nothing; we serve Truth.”

Introducing generative AI into this search temple risks weakening the power of the Google dogma. In seeking to avoid being pickpocketed by OpenAI, Google may be attempting the worst strategy: superimposing two contradictory approaches.

Instead of defending its master position in search, Google corrupts its DNA by offering a hodgepodge version of both: demanding veracity from generative AI (which it doesn’t aim for — it generates plausibility, not truth) while reducing AI to an “enhanced search function,” when it is fundamentally a machine for formulating pure hypotheses.

Beyond Google, we must ask: is this “Picasso moment” damaging our already fragile relationship with truth?

Consider searching for “causes of the French Revolution.” A dedicated search engine (not an AI’s search feature) will provide — if you venture beyond the first page — diverse links from historians of all stripes: liberal, Marxist, legitimist, conservative, revisionist… You can then navigate these conflicting schools of thought. With AI, however, you get a smoothed, homogenized synthesis in seconds — slaloming past controversies.

Sometimes, seeking has no other purpose than to open us to the world’s complexity, while finding, perpetually tensioned toward its goal, blurs this diversity. In its obsession to always find, generative AI ceases to seek: this is precisely what pushes it into the arms of its infamous “hallucinations.”

Finding — but at what cost?

So, should we save Private Google? Perhaps. More urgently, we must save our proper searching engine: our capacity to seek.¶