Will Automatically Generated Content Kill Your Blog?

The gap between AI-generated content and human-generated content is closing, but the ethical gap (according to Google) is a hard line. According to Google’s John Mueller “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 web spam team were to see it, they would see it as spam.”

What does this really mean and what is the context of “automatically generated content” in the eyes of the Google machine? I’ve been digging in a lot in to what drives great content. It seemed like a good time to have a quick take on

You down with GPT-3? Yeah you know me!

You’ve inevitably read about GPT-3 and the various iterations along the way. GPT-2 and GPT-3 already got a little more press on what the ethical implications could be. Let’s set aside the challenges of learning biases for now. That’s a separate challenge I’ll talk much more about in a future blog.

What we want to explore is the implications of using AI-generated content in your website and searchable assets. There are dozens upon dozens (probably hundreds) of SaaS offerings that are leveraging GPT-3 and some proprietary pieces to individualize what they bring. A lot of SEO optimization companies are augmenting their search optimization and proprietary toolkits with some content generation to get you to to make their toolkit a multi-tool for your content marketing.

There’s a catch…but we don’t quite know the impact just yet.

Beware the Google Impact of AI Content Generators

To hear the specific section of a recent office hours session with the Google search team you can click play below which is already queued up and with about 2 minutes of listening.

GPT-3 as a Prompting Tool for Human-Generated Content

You shouldn’t be hammering out articles from GPT-3 infused products without any intervention or content adjustments. If you’ve used any of the tools out there then there’s a risk of both the quality and the Google AI impact when it comes to search and discovery.

The comments in the office hours session above clearly mention the terms of use. There isn’t any real detail about the actual impact on search results and rankings. That’s part of the challenge with the proprietary engine inside Google. We can only get guidance, not specifics on what is and isn’t the result of these types of things.

Content generators are fantastic tools that can help you spur the creative engine. I’ve dabbled with a few to see how they react to certain prompts and what the results are. After lots of test runs I found that I wouldn’t use these to create content but I have found them to be helpful for framing up some ideas.

I’ve been creating written content for well over a couple of decades at this point. The addition of AI tools to help with content guidance is interesting. I’m definitely bullish on what the long-term potential is to help many people. When it comes to compelling content though, the human hand powered by the human brain is the way I roll.

I wanted to generate this blog entirely using a GPT-3 engine to be cheeky, but that would be cheating, right? 😉

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