John Mueller, Search Advocate at Google, said that content automatically generated by AI writing tools is considered spam according to the search engine’s webmaster guidelines.
This topic was covered in a recent Google Search Central SEO office hours hangout in response to a question about GPT-3 AI writing tools.
There is some debate in the SEO community about the use of GPT-3 tools and whether they are acceptable from Google’s perspective.
Mueller said AI-generated content falls into the category of auto-generated content, which can lead to manual penalties.
However, our systems may not have the ability to detect AI-generated content without the assistance of human reviewers.
As we’ll see later in this article, AI writing tools have practical uses, and many reputable organizations have successfully used them.
First, let’s take a look at Mueller’s response to a question about how Google views the use of these tools.
Auto-generated content violates Google’s webmaster guidelines
Machine-generated content is considered automatically generated, regardless of the tools used to create it.
As Mueller is quick to point out, Google’s position on auto-generated content has always been clear.
“For us, they basically fall into the category of auto-generated content that has been around since the very beginning of the Webmaster Guidelines.
And people have generated content automatically in many ways. And for us, if you’re using machine learning tools to generate content, it’s basically shuffling words, looking up synonyms, doing translation tricks that people used to do. Same thing.
My suspicion is that the content quality might be a bit better than really old school tools, but for us it’s still auto-generated content, and it still violates webmaster guidelines for us. means that it is spam. “
Can Google detect AI-generated content?
Follow-up questions will be asked regarding Google’s ability to identify content written by machine learning tools.
Can Google understand the difference between human-generated content and machine-generated content?
Mueller makes no claims about Google automatically detecting content written by AI.
However, if Google’s webspam team happens to find it, they are empowered to deal with it.
“We can’t say for sure. But for us, if we see something being automatically generated, the webspam team can definitely take action on it.
I don’t know how the future will evolve, but I think it’s going to be a bit of a cat-and-mouse game, just like with any technology. Then the webspam team catches up and solves the problem on a wider scale.
From our recommendations, this is still considered auto-generated content. I think over time this will evolve in that it becomes a tool for people. I will work with
And perhaps, over time, these AI tools will evolve in the direction we use to write sentences more efficiently, or to make sure we’re writing in a proper way, like spelling and grammar checking tools. will evolve into machine learning. But you never know what the future will bring there. “
Mueller makes it clear that Google does not consider how AI lighting tools are used.
Using them in any way is considered spam, he adds.
“Now they all violate webmaster guidelines. So from our point of view, if you come across something like that, if the webspam team sees it, they will already consider it spam.” prize.”
To hear his full response, see the video below.
What does this mean for your website?
Below are some insights from the head of the SEJ’s editorial team on what Mueller’s answer means for the website.
“The biggest takeaway from this particular Q&A is that Google’s algorithms can’t automatically detect content generated by language models such as GPT-3,” he said. Miranda Miller, Senior Managing Editor Here at Search Engine Journal.
“The message here is that webspam teams may take action if Google detects automatically generated content. But we’re talking about article spinners in 2003. not of.”
“Artificial intelligence is being used by media, universities, and other organizations to automate and cross-reference research, crawl and categorize content in many languages, identify new trends, and summarize articles and papers. We generate it, we check the facts, we process the data, we even write the whole article,” she points out.
“AP started using AI for story generation in 2014. Using AI for content creation is nothing new. The most important factor here is its intelligent application.” quality improvement, etc.
“These are good results. Isn’t it strange that Google bans the use of AI to improve the user experience for webmasters and content creators who often use AI?” she adds.
Featured Image: Zapp2Photo/Shutterstock
