There is a debate in the SEO community about the use of GPT-3 tools and whether they are acceptable from Google’s perspective. The topic was brought up during a recent meetup hosted by Google Search Central SEO in response to a question from a Reddit moderator about the use of GPT-3 AI writing tools.
John Mueller, who is a Search Advocate at Google, responded by pointing out that AI-written content falls into the category of auto-generated content, which could lead to a manual penalty provided detected.
Mueller underlined that Google’s position on auto-generated content has always been clear: “For us, this still falls under the category of auto-generated content, which is something we’ve had in the Webmaster Guidelines almost from the beginning. And people have been auto-generating content in many different ways. In our opinion, whether you are using machine learning tools to generate your content, it is essentially the same as provided you are simply mixing words, or looking up synonyms, or using translation tricks. I guess possibly the quality of the content is a bit better than the tools of old, but for us it’s still auto-generated content, and that means for us it’s still against the Webmaster Guidelines. So we would consider it spam.”
Asked provided Google can understand the difference between human-written and machine-written content, Mueller declined to confirm or deny whether Google can automatically detect AI-written content.
“I can’t confirm that. But for us, if we see something being generated automatically, the webspam team can take action on it.”
On the other hand, Mueller underscored that over time AI could evolve into a more widely used tool, drawing an analogy with machine translation that is currently used as the basis for presenting a website in another language but requires editing besides. and manual correction.
Regardless of the above, Mueller insisted that Google does not take into account how machine learning writing tools are used and that using them in any way is considered spam. “Violates webmaster guidelines. So from our point of view, whether we were to come across something like that, whether the webspam team caught it, they would call it spam.”
The meeting, Google hangout:
