Google News

Google says it focuses on the ‘quality of content’ in News as stolen AI copies run rampant

Ben Schoon | Jan 19 2024 - 8:47 am PT

AI is a powerful tool for good, but it can easily be used for bad, too. As AI duplicates of articles continue to flood Google News, the company has reiterated that it doesn’t care if an article is AI-generated, as long as it still has “quality.”

In a new story from 404 Media, an ongoing problem with Google News and AI articles is showcased.

Google News is increasingly full of content that’s being ripped from actual human journalists, fed through an AI, and posted online to random websites that aren’t curated in any form or fashion. These websites often pull content from dozens of other publications in an effort to capture web traffic, often pairing the content with as many ads as possible. These websites have always been a problem (often with site owners plastering the content on Reddit), but the rise of AI is just making it worse, and Google News isn’t doing a very good job at filtering this content out.

Late last year, 9to5’s Seth Weintraub commented on this problem, showing examples of articles from 9to5Google’s sister site Electrek being copied and pushed to Google News almost immediately by AI sites.

Google, though, doesn’t really seem to care.

In a statement to 404, a Google spokesperson said:

Our focus when ranking content is on the quality of the content, rather than how it was produced. Automatically-generated content produced primarily for ranking purposes is considered spam, and we take action as appropriate under our policies.

Notably, this isn’t a fully new statement, though, and Google has been reiterating this sentiment for quite a while.

Clearly, Google’s policies aren’t getting the job done right now. It does not take much to find this automatically-generated content through the News, and it’s always abundantly clear that AI plays a role. Google also added that content is added to Google News in an automated process, and that the system “aims to reward original content.” 404 notes that, shortly after it contacted Google, some of the sites that were stealing its content were purged from News.

Meanwhile, Google continues to test its new AI-powered “Search Generative Experience” which surfaces information from sites around the web, and no longer even shows source links prominently, and largely buries News results too.