We recently asked our LinkedIn community if they thought AI-generated marketing content would be as good as human-created content within 10 years. As expected, 61% said human writers are the best, and Google agrees. The search engine marks AI-generated content as spam in a recent Linkedin poll.

Content creation takes time and effort to get right. It’s no surprise that companies look to cut corners with technology. Tools like generative pre-trained transformer 3 (GPT-3) artificial intelligence (AI) programs claim they can pump out content just like humans. If you’re looking for a quick fix, it sounds tempting. But with Google’s rules in place, what does it mean for your future content strategy? 

 

During a recent Google Search Central SEO office-hours event, Search Advocate Jon Mueller said automatically generated content is spam under Google’s webmaster guidelines. This isn’t exactly brand new information. There have been reports about “AI ruining the internet” out for quite a few years. But bringing it up again is a friendly reminder about why we can’t always trust technology.

Mueller essentially likened AI content to plagiarism by saying, “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.” In the writing community, plagiarism is a big deal. It’s cheating. We all learned how to avoid that in grade school. But Mueller’s comments went even further. Google doesn’t consider how you’re using AI writing tools, just that you are. And using them in any capacity is spam according to the webmaster guidelines.