In a hangout, one SEO professional asked John Mueller about AI generated content.
They explained that they are one of the moderators of Reddit. Ever since GPT-3 based AI writing tools started to get advertised, their community is having a debate over whether or not to use them, although their stance is mostly against it.
However, they are trying – struggling, actually – to see what Google’s official position on AI generated content actually is.
Someone posted to Reddit whether they should be using these AI content writing tools to which John responded, nope. But John had no further explanation to that.
Then John had also posted some cryptic tweets about it.
The SEO pro is just trying to understand more about how Google reacts to websites hosting AI written content.
And what is his suggestion for all of them (SEO pros)?
John explained that AI written content would still fall into the category of automatically generated content, which is something that they have had in Google’s Webmaster Guidelines since almost the beginning.
And people have been automatically generating content in many different ways.
For Google, if someone is using machine learning tools to generate their content, this is the same as if they were just shuffling words around or looking up synonyms or doing translation tricks that people used to do these things.
John’s suspicion as well is that perhaps the quality of content is a bit better than the old school tools.
But for Google, it’s still automatically generated content. And that means that for Google, it’s still against the webmaster guidelines.
This happens at approximately the 22:13 mark in the video.
John Mueller Hangout Transcript
SEO Professional 6 22:13
Hey, John, thank you so much for taking on my question. Yeah. So I’m one of the moderators at Reddit. And ever since GPT-3 based AI writing tools started to get advertised, our community is having a debate over whether or not to use them, although our stance is mostly against it. But we are trying, or maybe I should say, we are struggling to see what Google’s official position on the same. Someone had posted on Reddit, if they should be using these AI content writing tools, to which you responded, no. But you had no further explanation. And then you had also posted some cryptic tweets about it. So I’m just trying to understand more about how does Google react to websites hosting AI-written content? And what is your suggestion for all of us?
John 23:11
Yeah, so for us, these would essentially still fall into the category of automatically generated content, which is something that we’ve had in the Webmaster Guidelines since almost the beginning, I think. And people have been automatically generating content in lots of different ways. And for us, if you’re using machine learning tools to kind of generate your content, it’s essentially the same as if you’re just, I don’t know, shuffling words around or looking up synonyms or doing kind of the translation tricks that people used to do, those kinds of things. My suspicion is that maybe the quality of content is a little bit better than the really old school tools. But for us, it’s still automatically generated content. And that means for us, it’s still against the webmaster guidelines. So we would consider that to be spam.
SEO Professional 6 24:08
Just a follow-up on that. Are you saying that Google is able to understand the difference between human and AI content?
John 24:17
I can’t claim that. But I mean, for us, if we see that something is automatically generated, then the webspam team can definitely take action on that. And I don’t know how the future will evolve there. But I imagine, like with any of these other technologies, there will be a little bit of a cat and mouse game where sometimes people will do something and they get away with it. And then the webspam team catches up and kind of solves that issue on a broader scale. But from our recommendation, we still see it as automatically generated content.
I think, I don’t know, over time, maybe this is something that will evolve in that, it will become more of a tool for people, kind of like you would use machine translation as a basis for creating a translated version of a website. But you still, essentially, work through it manually. And maybe over time, these AI tools will evolve in that direction that you use them to kind of be more efficient in your writing or to make sure that you’re writing in a proper way, kind of like the spelling and the grammar checking tools, which are also based on machine learning. But I don’t know what the future brings there.
SEO Professional 6 25:38
So you are saying currently, it’s not there yet.
John 25:41
I mean, currently, it’s all against the Google Webmaster Guidelines. So from our point of view, if we were to run across something like that, if the webspam team were to see it, they would see it as spam.
SEO Professional 6 25:55
Got it, got it. Thank you so much.
