The Washington Post burns its own archive

"How the Ask The Post AI works, that is, is the machinery scans eight years' worth of the paper's 147-year history, tries to guess what stories have words related to the words in your query, strings together words from those stories with more guesswork, and then lists a sample of articles in its own chosen order. There's no way to rearrange them by date rather than by "relevancy," or to set a date range, or to do any other sorting or selection. The Post has replaced its computerized index with an even more computerized anti-index, an opaque barrier between the would-be reader and the news the Post has published....

Where there used to be a specific useful tool, there's now a generically useless thing that vaguely and incompetently mimics the general shape of the old tool. Everything you do on a computer is getting AI interventions grafted into the interface, to prevent you from accomplishing whatever it was you used to be able to accomplish...."