Bryson Meunier asked Gary Illyes of Google on Twitter are tools that generate readable content for humans from data "automatically generated content?" Gary responded that although Google has been thinking about that topic, they currently don't have much to say about it right now.
Here are the tweets:
We're thinking about this a lot, but we don't have much to say yet.
— Gary "鯨理" Illyes (@methode) July 14, 2017
Google's policy on automatically generated content is "content is content that’s been generated programmatically" which seems to include the question above. However, the examples given by Google do not directly address the example above. Google's examples are:
- Text translated by an automated tool without human review or curation before publishing
- Text generated through automated processes, such as Markov chains
- Text generated using automated synonymizing or obfuscation techniques
- Text generated from scraping Atom/RSS feeds or search results
- Stitching or combining content from different web pages without adding sufficient value
A couple years ago, Wired wrote a story named This News-Writing Bot Is Now Free For Everyone and talks about how bots are potentially the future for more of the necessary but less thought provoking articles that news publications write on a daily basis. Like press release summarizations, or financial earnings report stories and so on. It hasn't really taken off yet but who knows.
I would have thought that the Gary would have said yes, this is against Google's guidelines. But since he didn't say no, it makes me scratch my head.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
