I have the Google AI overview adblocked and I keep it up to date because it's an unbelievably hostile thing to have in your information space: it sounds truthy, so even if you try to ignore it it's liable to bias the way you evaluate other answers going forward.

It's also obnoxious on mobile where it takes up the whole first result space.

There's an attempt to kinda have these things documented for AIs, called llms.txt, which are generally hosted on the web.

In theory, an AI should be able to fetch the llms.txt for every library and have an actual authoritative source of documentation for the given library.

This doesn't work that great right now, because not everyone is on board, but if we had llms.txt actually embedded in software libraries...it could be a game changer.

I noticed Claude Code semi regularly will start parsing actual library code in node_modules when it gets stuck. It will start by inventing methods it thinks should exist, then the typescript check step fails, and it searches the web for docs, if that fails it will actually go into the type definition for the library in node_modules and start looking in there. If we had node_modules/<package_name>/llms.txt (or the equivalent for other package managers in other languages) as a standard it could be pretty powerful I think. It could also be handled at the registry level, but I kind of like the idea of it being shipped (and thus easily versioned) in the library itself.

I mean... Yeah I've had ChatGPT tell me you can't do things with Make that you totally can. They aren't perfect. What do you expect Google to do about it?

Yes I know hallucinations are a thing. But when I had problems lile that better prompting (don’t make assumptions) and telling it to verify all of its answers with web resources

For troubleshooting an issue my prompt is usually “I am trying to do debug an issue. I’m going to give you the error message. Ask me questions one by one to help me troubleshoot. Prefer asking clarifying questions to making assumptions”.

Once I started doing that, it’s gotten a lot better.

How else do you expect them to get the information from your site if you block them from accessing it?

I don't know this for certain, but I imagine there's some kind of kv store between queries and AI overviews. Maybe they could update certain overviews or redo them with a better model.

It'll need to make less up, so still worth it.

> I wonder if they could be found to be publishers of AI content they provide.

I don't see how it could be otherwise - who else is the publisher?

I'm waiting for a collision of this with, say, English libel law or German "impressum" law. I'm fairly sure the libel issue is already being resolved with regexes on input or output for certain names.

The real question of the rest of the 21st century is: high trust or low trust? Do we start holding people and corporations liable for lying about things, or do we retreat to a world where only information you get from people you personally know can be trusted and everything else has to be treated with paranoia? Because the latter is much less productive.