AI is great at producing words. Ask it for a document, and it will cheerfully produce another one. Every time. The humans who build products on top of it are, impressively, just as good — at inventing new ways to stop it from finding or updating the one it already made.
The result: my Google Drive now looks like my documents folder circa 2006. A sprawling archive of “final,” “final_v2,” and “final_ACTUALLY_final,” each one a fossil recording an earlier round of my search for the truth.
We were raised on two cloud-era beliefs: (1) nothing ever gets deleted, and (2) search always finds it. Both are technically true — and useless. I can find all 20 versions in seconds. I just can’t tell them apart.
- Last-updated timestamp? Changes the moment I open the file. Worthless.
- Who it’s shared with? Some versions were abandoned because of the people they were shared with. Also worthless.
So I’m left with twenty identical-looking files and no memory of any of them.
I don’t know if this is a temporary bug in how we work with AI, or the new permanent condition of knowledge work. I wish the answer was embarrassingly analog: print the important ones, put them on a shelf, and get the satisfaction of physically throwing the obsolete versions in the recycling bin. At least paper doesn’t quietly update its own timestamp behind your back.
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