For example, I searched for “google openai competing visions” and saw TechCrunch Article at the top of Google News. Below that were articles from Atlantic AND Bloomberg comparing competing companies’ approaches to AI development. But the fourth article to appear in the search results, just below those more reputable sites, was another Syrus #Blog article that largely copied the TechCrunch article in the top position.
As reported 404 Media in JanuaryAI-powered articles appeared repeatedly in Google News search results earlier this year for basic queries. Two months later, Google announced significant changes to its algorithm and modern spam policies in an effort to improve search results. In behind schedule April, Google said that major changes to remove unhelpful results from the search engine’s ranking system had been completed. “As of April 19, we have completed the rollout of these changes. You will now see 45 percent less low-quality, unoriginal content in search results, compared to the 40 percent improvement we expected during this work,” wrote Elizabeth Tucker, Google’s director of product management, in a statement. blog post.
Despite the changes, AI-generated spam remains a earnest problem for Google News.
“It’s a really common problem on Google right now, and it’s hard to say exactly why it’s happening,” says Lily Ray, senior director of search engine optimization at marketing agency Ambitious“We’ve had clients say, ‘Hey, they took our article and rewrote it with AI. It looks exactly like what we wrote in our original content, but it’s just some gibberish version that the AI rewrote.’”
At first glance, it was clear to me that some of the images on Syrus’ blogs were AI-generated, based on drooping eyelids and other deformed physical features—telltale signs of AI attempts to represent the human body.
Was the text of our article rewritten using AI? I reached out to the person behind the blog to learn more about how they did it, and received confirmation via email that the blog was created by an Italian marketing agency. They claim to have used an AI tool as part of their writing process. “Regarding your concerns about plagiarism, we can assure you that our content creation process includes AI tools that analyze and synthesize information from different sources, always respecting intellectual property,” someone named Daniele Syrus writes in the email.
They point to a single hyperlink at the bottom of the linked article as sufficient attribution. While better than nothing, a link that doesn’t even mention the publication by name is not sufficient attribution defense against plagiarismThis person also claims that the purpose of the site is not to receive clicks from Google search, but to test AI algorithms in multiple languages.
When Google was contacted for a response via email, the company declined to comment on Syrus. “We do not comment on specific websites, but our updated spam policy prohibit the creation of low-value, unoriginal content at scale in order to rank well on Google,” says Meghann Farnsworth, a Google spokeswoman. “We take action on sites around the world that don’t follow our policies.” (Farnsworth is a former WIRED employee.)