“…For example, about 10 years ago, there were understandable concerns about a rise in mass-produced yet human-generated content. No one would have thought it reasonable for us to declare a ban on all human-generated content in response. Instead, it made more sense to improve our systems to reward quality content, as we did.
…Automation has long been used to generate helpful content, such as sports scores, weather forecasts, and transcripts. …Automation has long been used in publishing to create useful content. AI can assist with and generate useful content in exciting new ways.”
Why Does Googler Detect AI-Generated Content?
The documentation that Nelson co-authored doesn’t explicitly states that Google doesn’t differentiate between how low quality content is generated, which seemingly contradicts his LinkedIn profile that states “detection and treatment of AI-generated content” is a part of his job.
The AI-generated content guidance states:
“Poor quality content isn’t a new challenge for Google Search to deal with. We’ve been tackling poor quality content created both by humans and automation for years. We have existing systems to determine the helpfulness of content. …Our systems continue to be regularly improved.”
How do we reconcile that part of his job is detecting AI-generated content and Google’s policy states that it doesn’t matter how low quality content is generated?
Context is everything, that’s the answer. Here’s the context of his work profile:
“Address novel content issues (e.g., detection and treatment of AI-generated content)”
The phrase “novel content issues” means content quality issues that haven’t previously been encountered by Google. This refers to new types of AI-generated content, presumably spam, and how to detect it and “treat” it. Given that the context is “detection and treatment” it could very well be that the context is “low quality content” but it wasn’t expressly stated because he probably didn’t think his LinkedIn profile would be parsed by SEOs for a better understanding of how Google detects and treats AI-generated content (meta!).
See also: The 10 Best AI Writers & Content Generators Compared
Guidance Authored By Chris Nelson Of Google
A list of articles published by Chris Nelson show that he may have played a role in many of the most important updates from the past five years, from the Helpful Content update, site reputation abuse to detecting search-engine first AI-generated content.
List of Articles Authored By Chris Nelson (LinkedIn Profile)
Updating our site reputation abuse policy
What web creators should know about our March 2024 core update and new spam policies
Google Search’s guidance about AI-generated content
What creators should know about Google’s August 2022 helpful content update
Featured Image by Shutterstock/3rdtimeluckystudio