According to the search engine’s webmaster guidelines, content automatically generated using AI writing tools is considered spam, according to Google’s search advocate John Mueller.
This topic was addressed in a recent Google Search Center SEO office hour hangout to answer questions about the GPT-3 AI writing tool.
There is debate in the SEO community about the use of GPT-3 tools and whether they are acceptable from Google’s perspective.
Content written by AI falls into the category of automatically generated content, which could lead to human penalties, Mueller said.
However, Google’s system may not be able to detect AI-generated content without the assistance of human reviewers.
As we’ll explain later in this article, AI authoring tools have practical uses, and many well-known organizations are using them without problems.
First, let’s look at Mueller’s answer to the question of how Google views the use of these tools.
Auto-generated content violates Google’s Webmaster Guidelines
Whatever was used to create it, machine-written content is considered automatically generated.
As Mueller is quick to point out, Google’s stance on auto-generated content has always been clear:
“For us, this is still basically in the category of auto-generated content, which is pretty much what we’ve had in the webmaster guidelines since the beginning.
People have been generating content automatically in many different ways. For us, if you use machine learning tools to generate content, it’s basically the same as if you were just moving words around, looking up synonyms, or doing translation tricks that people used to do. that kind of thing.
My suspicion is that the quality of the content may be a bit better than the real old school tools, but for us it’s still auto-generated content, which means for us it’s still against webmaster guidelines. So we would consider it spam. “
Can Google detect AI-generated content?
Follow-up question on Google’s ability to recognize content written by machine learning tools.
Can Google understand the difference between content written by humans and content written by machines?
Mueller makes no claim that Google automatically detects AI written content.
However, if Google’s spam team happens to spot it, they have the right to take action on it.
“I can’t say that. But for us, if we see something being auto-generated, the spam team can definitely act on it.
And I don’t know what the future holds out there, but I imagine with any other of these technologies, there will be a bit of a cat-and-mouse game where sometimes people do something and they get away with it, and then the webspam team caught up and addressed the issue on a wider scale.
We still treat it as auto-generated content based on our recommendations. I think over time this may evolve into a tool for more people. Kind of like you would use machine translation as the basis for creating a translated version of your website, but you still have to do it manually.
Maybe over time these AI tools will evolve in the direction you use them to improve your writing efficiency or to make sure you’re writing in the right way, like spelling and grammar checkers, which are also based on machine learning. But I don’t know what the future will bring. “
Mueller clarified that Google did not consider how the AI writing tool would be used.
Using them in any capacity is considered spam, he added.
“It’s all against webmaster guidelines at the moment. So from our point of view, if we had something like that, if the webspam team saw it, they would see it as spam.”
To hear his full response, watch the video below:
What does this mean for your website?
Here are some insights from the SEJ editorial team leaders on what Mueller’s response means for your site.
“I think the biggest takeaway from this particular Q&A is that Google’s algorithms cannot automatically detect content generated by language models like GPT-3,” said Miranda MillerSenior Editor-in-Chief Search Engine Magazine here.
“The message here is that if Google detects auto-generated content, the web spam team may take action. But we’re not talking about article spinners from 2003.”
“Artificial intelligence is being used by the media, universities and other organizations to automate and cross-reference research, crawl and categorize content in multiple languages to identify emerging trends, generate article and dissertation abstracts, fact-check, process data, and even write full articles, ‘ she pointed out.
“The Associated Press started using AI to generate stories in 2014. The use of AI for content creation is nothing new, the most important factor here is its intelligent application,” Miller said, noting that using AI can help content creators Overcome language and literacy barriers, improve writing quality, and more.
“These are great results. Isn’t it weird that Google prohibits webmasters and content creators from using AI to improve user experience, while they themselves use it so heavily?” she added.
Featured Image: Zapp2Photo/Shutterstock
