Since its release in 2020, OpenAI's GPT-3 and all other AI content generators based on it have shocked the tech world with their impressive capabilities at spinning out instant content with just a few prompts.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=loRJkgeRgt4?embedable=true
(Jaspar is one of the AI content generators built on GPT-3’s platform in action)
By now, the vast majority of people who have anything to do with creating content for the web have seen demos of these tools in action. So they grasp all that it entails: its value proposition and benefit.
Deep down, they know AI is changing the content game, but they are afraid of using it.
They fear the repercussion that may later come down the line like the:
- Florida update in 2003,
- Penguin update in 2012
- Panda update in 2014,
- Medic update in 2018, and
- Helpful Content update in 2022.
But I think that fear is unfounded.
Google will fail to crank down on AI-generated content.
I didn't arrive at this conclusion on a whim. Neither did it appear to me in a dream. Nor was it some thought-up opinion. Instead, it's a result of experimenting with various AI tools available on the Market for months and seeing first-hand what they are capable of.'
And that's what I will show you in this article.
Google has performed beyond our wildest expectations
Don't you get amazed by its search capability?
From time to time, I do. You type in a bunch of keywords into that small little textbox. You hit the "Search button", and boom, in the blink of an eye, you see over 10 million results before you.
Sometimes, you don't know exactly what you want. But if you have the faintest hint —put it into the search box, and Google will guide you with her smart autosuggestions.
Isn't that impressive?
At one point, the running joke on Twitter was that knowing things isn’t the most incredible skill in life, but one's ability to use Google to find them fast.
But it wasn't always so
Search in the late 90s was far different from what we have today. Back then, it was a completely frustrating experience — despite only a few thousand websites on the internet.
In fact, Google wasn't the world's default Search engine. It was $125B Yahoo. So how did small Google, a baby Startup from Mountain View, beat big Yahoo to become the behemoth that it is today?
A lot of people have taken a lot of stabs at that question over the years and missed
Some say it's because of their minimalist design.
Google's homepage was just a Search box and a Search button,
While Yahoo's homepage was cluttered.
Paul Graham, Y-combinator's Founder, dedicated a whole page on his site to this topic. There, he says it's because Yahoo got excess unmerited revenue, and they were Media-centric instead of Tech-centric.
PG's answer reminds me of the warning I was giving about good Storytellers. It came from two different Nobel-Prize winners, Richard Feynman and Dr Daniel Kahneman, at two different times.
And the warning is: Good storytellers can easily fool those of us who aren't experienced in scientific rigour or statistics. Now add PG's authority, and the claim begins to look solid. But in reality, it isn't.
In an article on TechCrunch, Mohit Aron, a former Google Engineer now the CEO of Mohesity, says it's because of the infrastructure. He made reference to some scalability complexity kinds of stuff.
But he's an Engineer, so I quite understand the sentiment
Some Branding Expert cooked up an article I will not link to for some reason on Wharton's University of Pennsylvania website. Similar to the Engineer, they said it's because of the differences in their "brand approach".
The article also made mention of the Brand's Purpose, Vision, and Mission statement. They even mentioned Logo, which overall, and to me, is laughable.
PS: When you see rhymes like "Yahoo Confusion VS Google's Clarity", there's probably bullshit in the air. Beware
And the (closest) answer?
It came from another former Google Engineer, Robert Rossney. And it's in how Google easily presents the most relevant information to the user's search term. The algorithm behind this was called PageRank.
PageRank rates the result using the number of high-quality backlinks a site has. In simple form: the more links from high-quality sites a page has, the more it is trusted and the better it ranks in the search engines.
The invention's clear difference in producing the valuable result in 1996 tipped the Search war in Google's favour. And ever since then, they've been Guardians of the Galaxy web.
And whenever the algorithm got gamed, Google's subsequent response and patches (updates) over the years solidified its position and dominance.
But they are not perfect
Take Backlinks buying, for example. Bad actors use it to trick Google's algorithm into pushing their site to spots they don't deserve. Google knows. And has been fighting it as far back Oct 2007 (PageRank update).
Yet, people are still selling it to date.
In fact, it's a full-blown business.
With so much capital in the market, it's one reason why the Search Engine result page has been shit in the past few years. So much so that people now append the word "Reddit" to improve their search results.
This is one reason why I think they will fail to police AI-generated content. Like backlinks, it's entirely out of their watch. This is truer if you edit the output instead of pushing it directly into production.
But that's just one reason; here are two more:
AI is better than most Humans
I'm not saying this to shame anyone; there are times I look at my piece and reconsider ever picking Content Marketing as a career. But the thing is, there's some really shitty content on the web that you'd think could only come from a bot, but it's, in fact, written by a human.
It's as though English is not the writer's first language, and most times, that's true. Content mills in the west charge their clients thousands of dollars yet outsource them for pennies to writers living in the third world, like Pakistan, India, Thailand etc
I have also used (iWriter et al) the quality is about the same.
Ai-generated content has been written a lot better than some of the content writers I've used in the past.
And because of the pay and the nature of the job, these Writers end up copying and rephrasing what already exists out there. No narrative, no storytelling whatsoever!
Sometimes, their articles are full of what Ryan Law, Animalz VP of Marketing, calls "factual inaccuracies", resulting from the less-than-rigorous research that goes into them.
This is the same weakness Experts accuse AI content of.
Yet, these content rank, particularly when they are published on sites with high DR. We see them on the first result page all the time. So why should better content not rank because humans didn't write them?
Is the Time-Compute worth it?
In the online AI vs Google debates, besides asking if Google can detect AI content, I think the question not asked often is: How much will it cost them to do so for every page in their database?
It's a lot and probably not worth it.
For one, AI content is far different from "spun content". Ryan Law, whom I referenced earlier, describes Spun Content best: a fancily rephrased content whose underlying structure remains the same as the original.
"It’s easy for Google to spot synonyms", he says. And countless Google updates after updates have shown this. But you can't say the same for AI-generated content. Sometimes, you wouldn't know if you weren't told!
Not mere rephrasing. Cut and paste, find and replace.
Now, if humans struggle to know, who will train the AI to learn to? I mean, people are using AI to win an art competition these days. How much more words!
It gets even more interesting when you consider the pace of innovation for these tools.
-
GPT-1 had 117 million parameters.
-
GPT-2 had 1.5 billion.
-
While GPT-3 has 175 billion, which is a whopping 116000% increase over GPT-2.
Imagine what they have in store with GPT-4!
And a quick trivial
If Google is not sold on AI, then:
- Why are they rewriting Meta Descriptions and Title tags with AI?
- Why are they offering to help their AdWords customer rewrite their ads using AI? (and please don't @ me).
Want to know a little secret?
AI content is not new. It just became accessible to the public. Large media companies like the wall Street journal have been using it for over five years now.
So also Google.
Or, how do you think they create zero-click content?
But I know Google. They will fight hard and won't relent
And the only way I see them overcoming this challenge is by changing the incentives, I.e. Stop rewarding Quantity and start rewarding Quality.
This will require a systematic change in how they review the content they index. I foresee them using a rating system for blog Authors.
- Your articles won't get indexed without registering.
- You are rewarded every time a reader finds your piece valuable.
- Break the rules, and it displays prominently on anything you write.
While I've not thought through the idea for long, I believe this will raise the bar for written content and elevate the writer's value.
Otherwise, Google will lose their search dominance to upcoming Search Engines or to Tiktok (which is already happening).
I know some corporate defenders may want to throw the fact that they just recorded their all-time highest revenue at my face, so I'll remind you of the best time when having sex: just before it ends.