Google: No bad AI content

PLUS: Uh-Oh Air Canada's Chatbot!

Author

Shubhangi Mittal
March 08, 2024

Google’s new core update will last all of this month and will target spammy results. Bad news for those who have been pushing mass-produced, AI-written content to manipulate search rankings. If it’s low-value as per Google, you will be penalised.

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IN THIS ISSUE

  • Google targets low-value, AI-generated content

  • Lessons learned: Air Canada's Chatbot incident

  • 12 New Jobs For The Generative AI Era

  • From the AI community

  • Event Calendar

  • Growth Corner: 10 AI Terms that you must know according to Microsoft

TOP PICKS

Photo by Solen Feyissa on Unsplash

Google targets low-value, AI-generated content

Google has launched a complex update for its search systems this month. This update aims to improve the quality of Google search results by reducing spammy output. To do so, Google has introduced policies to curb:

a. Expired domain abuse: using expired domains to provide low-to-no value content to visitors. This is done to piggyback on the past reputation of the domain name.

b. Scaled content abuse: Low-value content, irrespective of how it is produced - human, AI, or a combination of both, will be categorized as spam.

c. Site reputation abuse: Third-party sites that are hosted on a website as a sponsor, partner, or advertiser, with little involvement of the host site and exploit the host site's rankings without providing any value to the visitors.

Photo by Alex Knight on Unsplash

Lessons learned: Air Canada's Chatbot incident

“AI is NOT a strategy. It’s an innovation looking for a strategy.”

Companies mistake AI as a strategy to deploy rather than an innovation strategy that should be deployed.

AI is not the answer to your content strategy. AI is simply a way to help an existing strategy be better.

The story starts with a man asking Air Canada’s chatbot if he could get a retroactive refund for a bereavement fare as long as he provided the proper paperwork. The chatbot encouraged him to book his flight to his grandmother’s funeral and then request a refund for the difference between the full-price and bereavement fair within 90 days. The passenger did what the chatbot suggested.

Air Canada refused to give a refund, citing its policy that explicitly states it will not provide refunds for travel after the flight is booked.

When the passenger sued, Air Canada’s refusal to pay got more interesting. It argued it should not be responsible because the chatbot was a “separate legal entity” and, therefore, Air Canada shouldn’t be responsible for its actions.

The passenger won the case.

Air Canada's incidence is instructional in 2 ways:

a. They forgot the 'human' aspect of customer interaction and customer service. They had an opportunity to right the 'wrong' by granting a refund + a little extra to the passenger.

b. They had an opportunity to rectify the discrepancy between what was stated on their website and the chatbot responses. Instead, they chose to fight the passenger which completely backfired.

Generative AI is a fantastic recognizer of patterns and understanding of the probable next word choice. But it’s not doing any critical thinking.

It cannot discern what is real and what is fiction.


12 New Jobs For The Generative AI Era

“Rather than replace human workers, generative AI is going to create a new need for skilled workers – professionals with the ability to manage and get the best out of generative AI.”

Some of the new jobs in the AI age are:

  1. AI Prompt Engineer

  2. AI Input And Output Manager

  3. AI Content Reviewer/Content Auditor

  4. AI Trainer

  5. AI Instructor/AI Literacy Educator


FROM THE AI COMMUNITY

EVENT CALENDAR

  1. What Marketing Leaders Need To Understand About How AI is Evolving - Multimodal AI, GPTs, & AI Automation by Nicole Leffer

    📅March 8 | 🔔 10 AM PT | Register

  2. Unlock the full potential of your video content, a four-day deep dive

    📅March 12-15 | 🔔 12 PM ET | Register

  3. AI in Action: HubSpot's blueprint for advanced content creation

    📅March 20 | 🔔 2 PM ET | Register

  4. The Global Content Innovation Summit

    📅March 21 | 🔔 9 AM PT | Register

GROWTH CORNER

The 10 AI terms that you must know according to Microsoft

Terms explained:

  1. Artificial Intelligence

  2. Machine Learning

  3. Large Language Models

  4. Generative AI

  5. Hallucinations

  6. Responsible AI

  7. Multimodal Models

  8. Prompts

  9. Copilots

  10. Plugins

Thanks for reading. See you next week,

Shubhangi