According to Google’s webmaster guidelines, the content generated automatically with AI writing tools is considered spam, according to Search Advocate John Mueller.
In response to a question about GPT-3 AI writing tools, this topic was discussed during a recent Google Search Central SEO office-hours hangout.
The use of GPT-3 tools is up for debate in the SEO community, as is whether they’re acceptable from Google’s perspective.
According to Mueller, AI-generated content falls under the category of auto-generated content, which could result in a manual penalty.
However, without the help of human reviewers, Google’s systems may be unable to detect AI-generated content.
As we’ll see later in this article, AI writing tools have practical applications, and many reputable organizations use them without issue.
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Let’s start with Mueller’s response to a question about Google’s attitude toward the use of these tools.
Google’s Webmaster Guidelines prohibit the use of automatically generated content
Content written by machines is considered automatically generated, regardless of the tools used to create it.
Google’s position on auto-generated content has always been clear, as Mueller points out:
“For us these would, essentially, still fall into the category of automatically generated content which is something we’ve had in the Webmaster Guidelines since almost the beginning.
And people have been automatically generating content in lots of different ways. And for us, if you’re using machine learning tools to generate your content, it’s essentially the same as if you’re just shuffling words around, or looking up synonyms, or doing the translation tricks that people used to do. Those kind of things.
My suspicion is 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.”
Is it possible for Google to detect AI-generated content?
A follow-up question concerns Google’s ability to recognize content generated by machine learning tools.
Can Google tell the difference between human-written content and machine-written content?
Mueller makes no claims about Google automatically detecting AI-written content.
However, if Google’s webspam team discovers it, they are authorized to take action.
“I can’t claim that. But 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 other of these 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 solves that issue on a broader scale.
From our recommendation we still see it as automatically generated content. I think 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 work through it manually.
And maybe over time these AI tools will evolve in that direction that you use them to be more efficient in your writing or to make sure that you’re writing in a proper way 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.”
Google, according to Mueller, does not take into account how AI writing tools are used.
He goes on to say that using them in any capacity is considered spam.
“Currently it’s all against the 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.”
To hear his full response, see the video below:
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