(201) 305-0055
Tim Peter Thinks

Google Says You Should Not Use AI To Create Content… Kind Of (Thinks Out Loud 457)

Screenshot of Google search results asking if you should use AI to create content

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music | Youtube Music | RSS

Google may have just told marketers they can never use AI to create content. Or… maybe not. Their actual recommendations are somewhat more nuanced than simply “AI bad” or “AI great.”

What’s important about what they said, though, is that they’re being clear about what they’re looking for — and, more importantly, what your customers are looking for. And their guidelines make it relatively easy to understand when you can use AI, when you can’t, and what you should expect from your AI tools when creating content.

In this episode of Thinks Out Loud, we break down Google’s guidance around AI content and lay out how you can make it work for you, your customers, and your business.

Want to learn more? Here are the show notes for you.

Google Says You Should Not Use AI To Create Content… (Thinks Out Loud 457)— Headlines and Show Notes

Show Notes and Links

You might also enjoy this webinar I recently participated in with Miles Partnership that looked at "The Power of Generative AI and ChatGPT: What It Means for Tourism & Hospitality" here:

Free Downloads

We have some free downloads for you to help you navigate the current situation, which you can find right here:

Best of Thinks Out Loud

You can find our “Best of Thinks Out Loud” playlist on Spotify right here:

Subscribe to Thinks Out Loud

Contact information for the podcast: podcast@timpeter.com

Past Insights from Tim Peter Thinks

Technical Details for Thinks Out Loud

Recorded using a Shure SM7B Vocal Dynamic Microphone and a Focusrite Scarlett 4i4 (3rd Gen) USB Audio Interface into Logic Pro X for the Mac.

Running time: 13m 28s

You can subscribe to Thinks Out Loud in iTunes, the Google Play Store, via our dedicated podcast RSS feed (or sign up for our free newsletter). You can also download/listen to the podcast here on Thinks using the player at the top of this page.

Transcript: Google Says You Should Not Use AI To Create Content… Kind Of

Welcome to Thinks Out Loud. I’m Tim Peter. You probably know that Google relies on human beings to review some search results and some web pages, particularly in tough niches.

Google provides these search quality raters with guidelines for how to rate the pages they review. In the latest version of these guidelines, which I will of course link to in the show notes, Google tells its quality raters, and this is a quote, “to watch out for pages with main content created using automated or generative AI and rate them as lowest quality.” They continue by saying, “even if you are unsure of the method of creation, for example, whether or not the page is created using generative AI tools, you should still use the lowest rating when you strongly suspect scaled content abuse after looking at several pages on the website. The lowest rating applies if all or almost all of the main content on the page, including text, images, audio, videos, et cetera, is copied, paraphrased, embedded, auto or AI generated…”

It continues from there and I’ll come back to that in a minute.

This is an amazing document. It almost sounds like Google is saying, don’t use AI to create content, which personally I find hilarious given that they put AI Overviews at the top of a gazillion search results these days. But I digress.

That’s not what Google’s actually saying though. So what is Google really saying here? Can you use AI to create your content or not? What’s the real story?

This is episode 457 of the Thinks Out Loud podcast. Let’s dive in.

The excerpt I read from Google before the break emphasized the AI generated element of the Google Search Quality Rater guidelines. However, when I emphasized that line, I left out the very last part. Here’s the full excerpt:

“The lowest rating applies if all or almost all of the main content on the page, including text, images, audio, videos, et cetera, is copied, paraphrased, embedded, auto or AI generated or reposted from other sources with little or no effort, little to no originality and little to no value for visitors to the website.”

Is Google saying that you can’t use AI? No, not really. What they’re saying instead is that you can’t use AI to create crappy content. They’re also saying you can’t use any method to create crappy content. They’re saying don’t put crappy content in front of your customers no matter how or where you get that content.

They call out low quality content for what it means. It means that you’ve expressed “little to no effort, little to no originality, and little to no added value for visitors to your website.”

Which, mean, come on, that feels like we should know that already, right?

Forget Google. Can you imagine anyone, any human being saying, “No, really, I would love to see your low effort, unoriginal page that adds no value whatsoever to my life. Please, please, please waste my time that way”? Of course not. That’s never going to happen. So maybe let’s not do that.

Let’s start with why AI-generated content is particularly dangerous in this regard, though; why it’s bad for your customers and bad for your business. I’ve mentioned in past episodes that you can’t copyright AI content if it doesn’t include “sufficient expressive elements.” That’s a direct quote from the US Copyright Office.

They also call out that copyright doesn’t cover, and again this is a quote, “the mere provision of prompts.” Meaning that if you come up with a perfect, spectacular, never before seen prompt that causes your favorite AI to spit out completely new text, images or video and then present that to the world, the Copyright Office will say, "Bummer, dude. It’s not copyrightable."

Weirdly, Google might be okay with that output. Maybe. Depending on whether or not its raters find it of sufficiently high quality. Though, personally, I wouldn’t bank on it.

In part, I wouldn’t bank on it because someone else might stumble on an equally perfect, spectacular, never-before-seen prompt that causes their favorite AI to spit out text, images, or video that looks more or less the same as yours. There’s no guarantee that the AIs won’t generate something remarkably similar, and there’s actually some evidence to suggest that they will do exactly that.

So it might be decent quality. It might even offer some value. But it’s sort of low effort and it’s likely not terribly original. Or at least it won’t be original for long. Especially since you can’t copyright it.

We saw essentially the same thing in search for years, where site owners would hire offshore writers at content farms to spit out tons of SEO optimized — meaning heavily keyword stuffed — content, with titles and text containing words like best and the target keyword over and over and over again.

The Verge did one of the best things I’ve ever seen in this regard. They had a hilarious article last year that mocked that practice. The title of the article was "Best Printer 2024, Best Printer for Home Use, Office Use, Printing Labels, Printer for School, Homework, Printer, You Are a Printer, We Are All Printers." Showing, of course, that you can have a sense of humor about these things, Ironically, the article itself was pretty good.

Anyway, notice that bad sites were doing then exactly what Google is arguing against now. They were just using human intelligence at the time — and frankly, not much of that — instead of artificial intelligence. It’s the same thing.

Google’s not saying AI is bad. They’re saying bad content is bad. Bad content is bad for your customers. Bad content is bad for search results. And ultimately, bad content is bad for your business. It’s not a place you want to be. It’s not a place anyone wants to be.

So what should you do instead? What can you do instead?

Well, how about we flip Google’s guidelines on their heads?

  • Instead of demonstrating no effort, how about you demonstrate effort?
  • Instead of having no originality, demonstrate originality.
  • And most importantly, instead of having little to no added value for visitors to your website, provide value for visitors to your website, added value for visitors to your website.

When I think of quality content, when people ask me what quality content is, it’s that last bit that I always come back to. Your content should, it must, provide value to your website or app visitors. Your content should answer a meaningful question. It should help them solve an actual problem in their lives. It should make their lives at least a little bit better, if not a lot better.

Anyone who knows anything about search knows that Google is particularly concerned about what they call YMYL content. That is content that matters to “your money or your life,” YMYL. They want to make sure that any content that ranks for those topics isn’t going to cause people to lose money or damage their health and safety. That seems like a good idea, no?

I’d argue that you should take similar care with the content you provide to your customers, even if you’re not in a YMYL business, even if it’s not YMYL information.

After all, if you don’t care whether your content matters in your customers’ lives, why should your customers care? Right?

This is like 101 right here. If you don’t care about your content, if you don’t care to create quality content, why should your customers care either? This isn’t about AI. It’s about human beings.

Do you care about your customers? Do you care about their problems? Do you care about helping them improve their lives or at least improve their day? Of course you do. Then why not make sure that your content shows that you care?

You can use AI to help you brainstorm what that content might be. You can use AI to help you outline the content. You can use AI to help you create personas of your target customers so that you’re thinking about the right people as you create those outlines for your content. You can use AI to review your content and find errors in your thinking or your writing. I do this all the time. And yes, you can use AI to help draft some of your content or create alternative or more personalized versions of your content.

Just keep your focus on creating content that shows effort. Keep your focus on creating content that demonstrates originality. And above all, creating content that provides added value to your audience and your customers, content that shows you care.

Google’s raters will like it better. Google search results will likely rank it more often. And most importantly, your customers will get value from it. And ultimately, so will your business.

Show Wrap-Up and Credits

Now, looking at the clock on the wall, we are out of time for this week.

I’m willing to bet that you might know someone who would benefit from what we’ve talked about today. Are you thinking of someone? Why not send them a link to the episode? Let them know what you think, too.

You can also find the show notes for this episode, episode 457, plus an archive of all of our past episodes by going to timpeter.com/podcast. Again, that’s timpeter.com/podcast.

And of course, be sure to like and subscribe wherever you get your favorite podcasts.

Thank you so much for listening. This show would not happen without you. I’ll be back with a new episode next week. And until then, please be well, be safe, and as the saying goes, be excellent to each other. See you soon.

Tim Peter is the founder and president of Tim Peter & Associates. You can learn more about our company's strategy and digital marketing consulting services here or about Tim here.

Back To Top
Search