It’s easy to criticise the output of AI content tools but expecting them to match the quality of professional content writers is unfair. Keep in mind that these algorithms can only generate content by analysing existing content from around the web. All they’re really doing is mashing phrases and sentences together from patterns they spot in relevant content covering the same topics.
There are several issues with this:
- Originality: You can’t produce unique dataset content by simply replicating what’s already been published in existing content.
- Input quality: Most content published around the web is of average quality or worse.
- Expertise: You’re not going to establish any sense of expertise or authority with generic content.
Even if these machine learning models could match human writers linguistically! they’re not going to produce anything new or insightful. The technology will continue to improve! however! as things stand! even the best AI content tools struggle to produce coherent sentences or make any meaningful points.
It certainly can’t explain anything technical or go into detail about a subject – not without extensive human intervention.
What does Google have to say about using AI-generated content?
Earlier this year! Google responded to the what is mical seo and why is it important? increased use of AI content tools with a clear statement. More specifically! Google’s John Mueller responded to a question in an April 2022 SEO Office Hours session asking about Google’s view on AI content tools.
Here’s the short version of his answer:
“Currently it’s all against the belgium business directory 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.”
Before reaching this conclusion! Mueller provided a more detailed answer:
“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.”
Mueller acknowledges that the latest breed of AI content tools are capable of producing better quality than some automation technologies in the past. However! he’s clear that the output of AI content tools is still considered web spam and it’s hard to agree when you consider the quality we looked at in the previous section.