In a slight change, Google is changing its stance and marking AI as the next big thing in content creation — even though they still care about user experiences more than ever before. This change was one of Google’s “Helpful content updates”, replacing the phrase “Written by real people” to say that the content is made for people. The announcement of this change is attributed to Stack Diary.
The change of tone here underlines how AI has come to be seen by Google as just another part of the content-creation process. Instead of simply drawing a line between the difference in value of user benefit of AI vs. human-written content, the engine has started to prioritize user benefit across all types of content (be it created by people or machines).
Google is pouring billions into AI at large, from AI-generated news services to its AI chatbot, Bard, to several different test feature releases. This is in line with changes in direction for Google to reward quality, authenticity, utility, and the end user experience.
“Typically what that leads to is you’re just getting the same content over and over again, because that’s all the AI has access to,” said John Mueller of Google Search Relations team. But highlights why we need to keep human eyes on creative work. As advanced as AI becomes, human oversight (or failure to check) will create bugs — funny ones and not so funny once you think about them or ones where the mistakes could be catastrophic financially or otherwise.
To SEO or not to SEO?
For SEO people globally, the meaning is evident as Google updates. Repetitive or shoddy AI- generated content could hurt your search engine rankings, even with the advancement of AI technology. That role of writers & editors continues very importantly. SEO relies on “matching” content to Google’s algorithm.
It seems like Google penalizes content summary-rephrased articles — even if it’s done through AI techniques such as basic summarization or paraphrasing, using automated processes and ML models in order to separate high quality from low quality content . But identifying AI generated content is difficult because AI algorithms try to simulate the human-like content. This tension between creators and filterers is likely to continue well into the future with more powerful and accurate AI becoming available.
More importantly, feeding training data to AI models produced by AI itself might cause the model to “collapse”, which adds another issue to think about. Instead of penalizing AI written content, the search engine will identify it and promote human-generated content. In this vein, this is in line with the idea of expert AI discriminators, which involves one AI attempting to generate text that looks like the real thing whilst another attempts to determine whether such text is genuine or not. This approach is already used in generative adversarial networks (GANs).
With the increasing growth of AI, standards will certainly change. Right now, they look to be focused on the quality of content by emphasizing content that is more user-driven as opposed to what’s generated by machine versus human. This approach puts Google in position to respond to changes in the AI-powered content market and keep the user experience at the pinnacle of its algorithm strategy.
