In a recent Search off the Record podcast, Google’s Lizzi Sassman and John Mueller discussed the use of AI-generated images on websites.

Some of their opinions may seem surprising given how Google treats AI textual content.

John Mueller highlights the inherent limitations of AI image generator technology.

Automatically Generated Content

Automatically generated textual content is prohibited for Google search within the limited context of its use for manipulating search results.

Google’s guidelines on automatically generated content state:

“In cases where it intends to manipulate search rankings and not help users, Google may take actions on such content.”

Google’s John Mueller is also on record stating that textual content generated by AI is considered spam:

“For us, these will, essentially, still fall into the category of automatically generated content which is something we’ve had in the Webmaster Guidelines since almost the beginning.

My suspicion is that maybe the quality of the content is a little better than the really old school stuff, but for us it’s still automatically generating content, and that means for us it’s still against Webmaster Guidelines. So we will consider that as spam.

…But for us, if we see something being generated automatically, the webspam team can definitely take action on that.”

And perhaps in a sign of the rapid pace of technological evolution, there are gray areas within Google’s bans on auto-gen content.

For example, using automatic text translation to generate content is against the guidelines except in cases where a person reviews and curates the content.

In the above mentioned guideline on autogenerated content, autotranslated content is prohibited with the following statement:

“Text translated by an automated tool without human review or curation before publication.”

Google also allows automatic generation of meta descriptions, probably because meta descriptions are not used for ranking purposes.

“For larger database-driven sites, such as product aggregators, hand-written descriptions may be impossible. …programmatic generation of descriptions may be appropriate and encouraged.”

So, Google doesn’t ban AI content altogether, just in certain situations.

AI Generated Images

Since AI-generated content can qualify for ranking on Google Images, one would think that AI-generated images would also be banned.

But apparently, that is not the case.

Lizzi Sassman and John Mueller discussed hypothetically using AI-generated content at Google and they’re pretty okay with it.

This is what they said:

“Lizzi Sassman: Hey! So just to get us started, I know you do a lot of DALL-E work on the Craiyon site, and all these kinds of places to get fun pictures.

And I was wondering what you would say about using DALL-E to generate images for our site, Google Search Central, if we just started piping that to refresh our images across the site– what can you say that?

John Mueller: That would be an exciting step.

The only area where Mueller expresses reservations about using AI for images is when depicting something that should be an actual object, such as a screenshot.

Mueller continued:

“I think the tricky part is that if you’re showing screenshots of specific things, and you’re going to put that in some machine-generated thing, then maybe you’re not necessarily going to get actual screenshots.

Lizzi Sassman: It could go in an interesting direction. Okay, so it looks like you’re bought. Will you do it?

John Mueller: I’ll try it. I mean…

Lizzi Sassman: You don’t want to tell me no?

John Mueller: I wouldn’t say “no.”

I have no idea what it will look like. It might look really cool. Or maybe for Halloween, we can do that.”

AI Generated Content Limitations

John Mueller’s only reservation about AI images is that the technology is based on image datasets and so its ability to generate an image is limited to what is in the library of those images on which it is trained.

Lizzi and John continue their discussion:

“I think one of the tricky parts with all these tools is that they build a known library of images.

And if there aren’t enough images to be found there, then whatever you ask is pretty vague.

So I try a lot of SEO terms at once, and usually when it recognizes that it’s something like SEO-oriented marketing, it’ll show me a graph of, like, some bar chart with line graph
drawing, and it’s like, “This is SEO.”

It’s like, “Well, it’s like… it’s…”

Lizzi Sassman: That’s like your opinion, man.

John Mueller: Yes. Exactly.”

AI Images Currently Okay?

Apparently using AI images within a website is okay.

While autogenerated text content is prohibited/limited for ranking in Google Search, surprisingly there is no similar prohibition or caveat discussed regarding AI generated images and ranking in Google Images.

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Listen to the Search Off the Record Podcast

The part about using AI Images starts at around the 34 second mark.

Featured Image by Shutterstock/san4ezz