Following our reporting that CNET had quietly published dozens of AI-generated articles, many voiced dismay at what appeared to be a sneaky attempt to eliminate the jobs of entry-level human writers, while downplaying the shoddy content for the site’s readers.
One group, however, was absolutely thrilled: spammers, who couldn’t contain their glee that a mainstream publisher got away with putting out bot-written content — and immediately voiced plans to do the same.
“Time to pump out ultra-fast content,” gushed a poster on BlackHatWorld, a notorious black-hat search engine optimization forum where members engage in dirty tricks and sell illegal services.
“Now is the time to maximize this pivotal moment that will drive down costs for writers,” chimed in another.
The implication was clear: that tools like ChatGPT will now allow Scofflaws to pollute the internet with near-infinite amounts of bot-generated junk, and that CNET – and its sister publication Bankrate – have now paved the way. In a way, it served as a perfect illustration of a recent warning from Stanford and Georgetown academics that AI technology could quickly fill the internet with endless amounts of misinformation and profiteering.
Spammers were particularly fixated on Google’s response to CNET and Bankrate’s AI revelations, which they interpreted as a reversal of their previous stance of penalizing AI-generated content in search results.
“Our ranking team focuses on the usefulness of content and not how the content is produced,” said Danny Sullivan, the company’s public search liaison, at the time. “This allows us to develop solutions aimed at reducing all types of unhelpful content in search, whether created by humans or through automated processes.”
On BlackHatWorld, spammers interpreted these comments as the launch pad for free AI content.
“This is nothing but handing over Google to AI,” wrote one. “In short, they say, ‘We are unable to differentiate between AI content and manual content, so we accept that as a way of life.'”
“My AI content serves the user… he serves them ads!” Another poster mocked the search giant. “So it’s all good, isn’t it Big G?”
It’s true that the rise of AI-generated content at the ChatGPT level is an escalation in Google’s never-ending battle with spammers. But according to the company, any spammers who go hard on the ChatGPT-style technology are in for a rude awakening.
As a Google spokesperson pointed out in response to questions, Sullivan and other employees of the search giant have been offering nuances about AI-generated content for some time.
The spokesman said that while some at the company have warned that Google will consider AI-generated content as spam, they specifically spoke about content written by bots that aims to manipulate the search engine’s system. In reality, they said, AI-generated content isn’t banned per se — but any content developed with the primary purpose of climbing search rankings still violates the company’s spam policies and is ripe for a crackdown crackdown.
“We didn’t say AI content was bad,” Sullivan wrote back in November 2022, for example. “We’ve been pretty clear that content written primarily for search engines and not for humans is the problem. That’s what we focus an AI on, same problem.”
In other words, he says, the ultimate goal isn’t necessarily to penalize material just because it’s AI-generated, but to hold spam and unhelpful content accountable, regardless of authorship.
“For more than 20 years, search has adapted to address new spam techniques and low-quality content, including mass-produced content in various forms,” Sullivan said in a new statement provided to Futurism. “We detect more than 40 billion spam pages every day and prevent them from appearing in search results. Content created with the aim of achieving a gaming search ranking – whether created by humans or AI – is still spam and will be treated as such. “
Whether Google will be able to rise to the challenge of ubiquitous AI-generated content will likely matter greatly to the quality of online information, as it’s still the de facto tool used by most people used to find things on the open web.
On the one hand, Google has enormous technical know-how, decades of experience and immense own investments in AI technology, all of which can be used against AI-generated spam. But if CNET’s efforts with AI-generated content are any sign of the future, there’s still going to be an uphill battle for one simple reason: This new breed of AI-generated smut is, on the surface, very compelling.
After our first story, CNET Editor-in-Chief Connie Guglielmo published a rather tepid post, publicly acknowledging the AI program and assuring readers that a human editor still carefully fact-checks each article. But as we reported in response, a close reading of one of CNET’s AI-generated financial explainers revealed that while it was written with great confidence, it was riddled with obvious factual errors.
The AI was unable to properly explain how basic compound interest works and garbled rudimentary facts about personal banking. Worst of all, the explainer was clearly aimed at people with a financial literacy, meaning the people most in need of help would be exposed to the lowest information imaginable if it were placed on Google.
These troubling inaccuracies show that while the AI is capable of stringing together grammatically correct – albeit rather prosaic – sentences, it often fails to get even basic facts right, despite adopting an authoritative tone.
Yet if Google’s repeated stance on spam and unhelpful content were true, then why do these AI-written explanations, riddled with embarrassing inaccuracies — designed to please search algorithms — still rank highly? A quick search reveals that CNET’s AI-written explanations, complete with accuracy warnings, are often still among the top results on Google.
Are you a current or former CNET employee interested in discussing the company’s foray into AI-generated articles? Email tips@futurism.com to share your perspective. It’s okay if you don’t want to be identified.
Another problem is that a lot of AI content is likely to go untagged. Even at CNET, former contributors now claim that the AI-generated material that has been flagged as such may have been just the tip of the iceberg.
At the end of the day, CNET and Bankrate still have staff who care about making things right and who are angry at the AI initiative. A Red Ventures employee told us this week that such was the internal outcry following coverage of Futurism that Bankrate suspended the release of all AI-generated content on Wednesday. CNET appears to have done the same, at least temporarily.
However, spammers on BlackHatWorld shouldn’t have such scruples. One in particular had dark thoughts of his own about the rise of AI.
“What if Google fully accepted AI content, just so they rolled out their own ChatGPT-style search feature, where users got answers directly without having to click on websites?” They mused. “That would be catastrophic for the entire Internet.”
Jon Christian contributed to the coverage.
More on the CNET AI saga: CNET’s article-writing AI is already publishing very stupid bugs
Do bots hurt SEO?
Malicious bots negatively impact SEO. They do this by slowing down a website’s load and response times and coordinating DDoS attacks.
How can a bot hurt a marketer? However, in recent years, search engine marketers have noticed how bots and fake users are interfering with their efforts. When fake traffic reaches a company’s website, it can damage a brand’s online reputation and ultimately reduce the effectiveness of paid and unpaid marketing campaigns.
Is bot traffic bad for SEO?
One of the most important factors in search engine optimization is how often bots crawl your content. If your content isn’t crawled frequently, it won’t rank as well in Google’s search results. In fact, bot traffic is one of the key indicators that Google considers when deciding whether or not to rank a piece of content.
What is bad bot traffic?
Bot traffic refers to any non-human traffic to a website or app. It’s actually pretty normal on the internet. If you own a website, chances are you’ve been visited by a bot. In fact, by 2022, bot traffic will account for more than 40% of all internet traffic.
Why are bots bad for websites?
Bad bots masquerade and try to interact with applications in the same way a legitimate user would, making them harder to detect and stop. They enable high-speed abuse, misuse and attacks on your websites, mobile apps and APIs.
Does Google Analytics count bot traffic?
Google Analytics 4 properties automatically exclude traffic from known bots and spiders. This ensures that, as much as possible, your analytics data does not include events from known bots.
Is bot traffic good?
Bot traffic is non-human traffic to a website. While some bot traffic is beneficial, abusive bot traffic can be very disruptive.
Do Chatbots help with SEO?
Well-designed and delivered chatbots can help you increase the length of stay on your website and improve your user experience (two of the most important SEO factors). If you want to improve your search rankings and_ _ get more organic traffic to your website, integrating a chatbot is the way to go.
What are the drawbacks of using chatbots?
Chatbots have limited answers, so they are often unable to answer multi-part questions or questions that require decisions. This often means your customers are left without a solution and have to go through additional steps to contact your support team.
What are the benefits of using chatbots?
Here’s how chatbots can help you with that.
- Available to customers 24/7. Chatbots are available day and night to answer customer questions. …
- Multilingual support. …
- Better personalization. …
- Simple checkout. …
- Proactive customer service. …
- Faster response time. …
- Offers omnichannel support.
How does chatbot help in marketing?
Chatbots can help automate marketing communications and ensure immediate and timely responses to customers. By making conversational AI chatbots a part of marketing initiatives, your business can also seamlessly guide customers through the sales funnel and drive conversions.
What can hurt your SEO?
14 Things That Can Hurt Your Website’s SEO Rankings [Infographic]
- Low quality links.
- Duplicate content.
- Internal link changes.
- Copyright infringement.
- Last google update.
- Increasing competition.
What is the bad practice of SEO?
Spinning Content Content “spinning” is a downright bad SEO tactic. It involves copying ideas and structures from other websites and then rephrasing parts of the content to avoid direct plagiarism. This may even include using artificial intelligence to optimize content.
Why does SEO fail?
However, the well-known thing that causes SEO to fail is pulling the plug too soon. “Too early” is before you’ve worked through the breadth of indexing, technical, content, on-page, and external factors (links and more). The more competitive the space, the more time you need.
Why is UGC better than influencer?
Compared to influencers, the value of UGC creators often lies less in their personal brand and more in the inherent power of their content. UGC creators don’t always share the content they’re paid to create; Instead, brands often buy the content and promote it on their own channels.
Is it worth being a UGC creator? Keep Moving On And while the career of a UGC creator might not be the grand career that some TikTokers make it out to be, it’s still a great way to generate income – and learn skills that will serve you well no matter what will the future holds.
Why is UGC so effective?
UGC offers customers a unique opportunity to participate in the growth of a brand, rather than just being a spectator. This greatly affects brand loyalty and affinity, as people benefit from being part of something bigger than themselves, and creating UGC allows them to be part of a brand’s community.
Why is UGC effective?
UGC campaigns empower businesses to reach consumers in fundamentally new ways. With the right approach and strategy, brands of all sizes can engage customers with an unparalleled sense of authenticity. In this way, companies can increase consumer awareness, but also achieve real, positive business results.
Does UGC perform better?
UGC-based ads get 4x higher CTR and 50% lower cost-per-click than average. UGC leads to 29% higher web conversions than campaigns or websites without UGC.
What is so special about user-generated content?
User-generated content is not traditional advertising – it is non-promotional and created by a selected member of your own target audience. Since UGC is not purely promotional content, customers find it more genuine. Another added benefit of UGC is that it can actually increase the effectiveness of your ads.
What are the advantages and disadvantages of UGC?
Table of contents
- Benefits of User Generated Content. Drives engagement and drives conversions. Reduces your content requirements. Benefits for your SEO. Helps build trust.
- Disadvantages of User Generated Content. Negative content is inevitable. Requires close supervision. Unknown and unreliable sources. The legality of everything.
Is UGC trustworthy?
Authenticity. Perhaps the greatest strength of user-generated content is that it is inherently more trustworthy than brand-generated content. According to Nielsen’s Global Trust in Advertising Report, 92 percent of consumers say they trust UGC or earned media more than any other form of advertising.
Does UGC perform better?
UGC-based ads get 4x higher CTR and 50% lower cost-per-click than average. UGC leads to 29% higher web conversions than campaigns or websites without UGC.
What are the benefits of UGC?
User Generated Content creates more trust between customer and brand. It is real and honest content that the potential customer can trust as it is not branded content but based on the experiences other users have had with the products.
What is UGC and why is it important?
User Generated Content or UGC is all types of content created and shared by users based on their experiences, opinions, ideas or feedback. Digital platforms, especially social media networks, are the hub for user-generated content. In terms of marketing, UGC is the content that is relevant to the brand.
Does UGC perform better?
UGC-based ads get 4x higher CTR and 50% lower cost-per-click than average. UGC leads to 29% higher web conversions than campaigns or websites without UGC.
Does UGC increase engagement?
On Instagram, UGC created by your audience can help other potential customers see themselves in these creative assets and can then enter your sales funnel in a variety of ways. Additionally, it will help build trust in your brand, drive more engagement, and ultimately improve your bottom line.
Is Jasper Ai good for SEO?
The AI-generated output generated by Jasper consists of 99.99% original content free from plagiarism. This allows you to generate quality content that is also SEO optimized in a fraction of the time it normally takes.
Is Jarvis AI worth it? The platform offers many different options for writing content, great support and training videos are available, and everything is very user-friendly. As far as an AI writing assistant goes, I would put Jarvis at the top of the list.
What can Jasper.ai be used for?
Jasper AI is a copywriting tool that harnesses the power of artificial intelligence and machine learning to automatically create compelling, enticing copy for your blog posts, landing pages, social media, ads, marketing emails, and more so you can write 5x more content in a fraction of the time.
What is Jarvis AI used for?
Jarvis is a popular AI writing tool. The platform can generate all types of content at the click of a button – making it easy for anyone to create quality written content. This includes web copy, blog posts, marketing content, and pretty much anything else you can think of.
Can Jasper.ai write a novel?
Jasper is an artificial intelligence writing assistant that can write fictional stories, blog posts, entire books, marketing emails, ad copy, creative stories and more.
What is Jasper artificial intelligence?
Jarvis AI is an artificial intelligence application that uses machine learning to write blog posts, articles, and content. The software was developed by David Vuong who has been in the industry for over 15 years. Jasper’s job is simple – he automatically writes your content based on what you type!
Can Jasper.ai rewrite an article?
That being said, rewriting content for Jasper can be a breeze once you know where to start and what to ask him to do. There are a few templates/features you should know before you start rewriting content. We recommend trying out all of these features in your app before you start your first piece of paraphrasing.
Is Jasper good for copywriting?
Jasper can create long-form copy for 1000-word articles with no research, outline, or planning required. With over 50 templates to choose from (which are added monthly) and the ability to create your own templates (recipes), Jasper makes it easy to create lengthy content.
Does Jasper write good copy?
Jasper is great at writing conversion-optimized ad copy. The tool can help you write great ad copy that is compelling and relevant to your audience. Facebook ads are still a huge source of traffic for many businesses.
What is the best copywriting tool?
Jasper (formerly known as Jarvis.ai) is one of the most comprehensive premium AI copywriting tools available. It uses GPT-3 and can generate some pretty awesome content! Japer can create content for almost anything including: Blogs (from drafts to full articles)
What is Jasper.ai good for?
Jasper AI is powerful, innovative GPT-3 content generation software that can be used in a variety of ways and at scale. It is a powerful new and innovative GPT-3 software that allows you to write SEO focused blog posts, lists, schoolwork, YouTube video scripts and books.
Is Jasper.ai easy to use?
One of the best things about Jasper.ai was its user-friendly interface. It was very intuitive and made it easy for us to get up and running quickly with minimal effort. The software also had a wide range of powerful features that allowed us to customize our workflow and create automated tasks.
Which is better copy AI or Jasper AI?
If you want our quick rundown, here it is: Jasper AI’s content output is way better. If you want consistently high-quality content, get Jasper. But Copy AI’s content isn’t bad. It can create excellent copy, especially for things like social media posts or emails.
Does Jasper AI work well?
Overall, the Jasper AI product is a great investment for those looking to save time and money by outsourcing their content. This service will help you produce high-quality texts with few errors while reducing the risk of typographical errors.
How much is Jasper AI per month?
Jasper.ai plans start at $24 per month billed annually or $29 billed monthly. The cost of each plan depends on the features you need and the amount of content you will be producing.
Is Jasper a good tool?
A great AI-enabled platform for generating high quality content. We get quick content suggestions, blog topic suggestions, and email headlines. Overall, Jasper is a great tool for creating AI content.
Will SEO exist in 10 years?
Speculations abound, but they do not always provide a reliable forecast of what is to come. However, one thing is certain: SEO will be around for a long time. As long as there are search engines and internet users use keywords and phrases to find what they are looking for, the search engine business will continue.
Does SEO have a future? Some of the prominent methods that AI tools have used to prove their effectiveness are SEO keyword research, content creation, traffic and website growth analysis, voice search, and SEO workflows. These applications have made it clear that the future of SEO lies in artificial intelligence.
Is SEO a long-term investment?
At its core, SEO is a long-term strategy. SEO requires an ongoing investment. Results are realized over time as the amount of improved connections. Just having a website full of content or products to sell doesn’t magically create organic traffic.
Will SEO exist in 5 years?
SEO will be around for a long time as social media and search engines will most likely merge. In fact, Facebook has already started, averaging over 1.5 billion searches per day, while Twitter has partnered with Google.
What is long-term SEO?
That’s how it is with search engine optimization. You must always be ready to change things up if necessary. A long-term SEO strategy means always looking for those sudden changes. How to plan your long-term SEO strategy. It really comes down to planning ahead.
Is SEO worth investing in?
SEO pays off when you have the right strategy and work with a partner who knows how to get results. About 93% of online experiences start with a search engine, and the close rate of SEO leads is much higher than that of traditional marketing. So, SEO offers an impressive return on investment (ROI).
Is SEO a short term or long-term strategy?
SEO is typically sold as a long-term investment and a digital marketing strategy that takes time to see results. This causes some companies that focus on quick results to be discouraged from investing in SEO, believing that they can only achieve quick results through channels like PPC.
Will SEO be obsolete?
Make no mistake: SEO isn’t dying, but it’s evolving into much more than it did years ago. If you’ve been debating whether or not to invest in SEO for your business, read on to learn why SEO doesn’t die — it actually thrives.
Will SEO become obsolete?
SEO is still alive. It is as relevant today as it has ever been. If anything, it may be even more important. Today, 53% of all website traffic comes from organic search.
Is SEO still relevant in 2022?
The fact that SEO is still working fine in 2022 as a method to achieve improved commercial outcomes for business websites and their owners, combined with the need to continuously research what works, makes it still relevant, but even more so, as a digital marketing method as a valuable service and worthwhile …
What is the future of SEO in 2030?
Gain Social Knowledge: The SEO specialist of the 2030s will be spending more time on social media, browsing platforms for trending conversations in your industry and audience. You’ll get insights into pain points, even small annoyances, to help you develop your SEO strategy.
Will SEO exist in 5 years?
SEO will be around for a long time as social media and search engines will most likely merge. In fact, Facebook has already started, averaging over 1.5 billion searches per day, while Twitter has partnered with Google.
What does the future of SEO look like?
The ultimate future of SEO is voice search In no time, Google will start responding to queries based on voice search. Google may require websites to format their page titles as questions, with answers provided in short paragraphs that include voice and text display.