What Google’s New Policy Tells Us About A.I. Generated Content

By now you’ve probably used one of the A.I. tools out there like ChatGPT or Bard.

And you’ve probably even created content using these tools.

Google has generally taken a stance that they are ok with content written by A.I. as long as it benefits people and isn’t focused on manipulating search results.

But I believe that’s going to change, and it’s already starting to happen…

Google Merchant Center Policy

Google just updated its merchant center policy with this…

Automated Content: We don’t allow reviews that are primarily generated by an automated program or artificial intelligence application. If you have identified such content, it should be marked as spam in your feed using the <is_spam> attribute.

In other words, A.I. generated content for reviews is considered spam.

And it makes sense why they are doing this. They want you to leave a “real” review. One that gives potential customers insights on if they should do business with a specific company or buy a product.

An A.I. generated review won’t give potential customers the same type of feedback as a human-written review.

But I bet it won’t stop there…

A.I. can produce inaccurate results

Although A.I. is great, it has its flaws. Keep in mind its output is based on inputs.

Inputs typically being the whole web that it is scraping and we all know that a lot of the content out there is inaccurate which can create bad outputs by A.I.

And it doesn’t necessarily mean it will get better over time. For example, a Stanford study found that ChatGPT went from answering a simple math question accurately 98% of the time to eventually only 2% of the time.

In other words, it got worse over time.

Another example of inaccuracy with A.I. is that physicians across 17 specialties posed 284 medical questions to ChatGPT. They found that it had an accuracy of 92%.

92% may be an A in school, but when you are dealing with medical advice, the wrong advice could potentially harm you or even kill you.

So, what do we think Google will do?

Although search engines don’t have an issue with A.I. generated content, they’ll want to control what it can or can’t be used for… at least when it comes to search results.

For example, I doubt they will want to showcase A.I. generated content for your money, your life topics.

In essence, financial advice, medical advice or anything if found inaccurate could hurt someone.

Just like how they don’t want A.I. generated reviews, they won’t want A.I. generated content in the long run for content that can be detrimental to someone.

On the flip side, I don’t think they would care as much if an A.I. piece on “how to tie a tie” was off. Because the worse case, it just may make you look bad if your tie wasn’t straight or was a bit uneven.

Conclusion

If you are creating content through A.I. make sure you have a human review it. That way you can ensure it is accurate and provides the most value to others.

We are finding a big trend of companies leveraging A.I. technology for all types of content. And in the long run, we believe their algorithms will prefer human-written content because it will get rarer.

A.I. needs human input and the best form of that is human written content. Hence, we think algorithms will focus on human-written content. And even if you use A.I. to start the writing process you can still have a human modify it.

So, the question is, how much of your content will be A.I. generated?