Google Partners With the Company Behind Sports Illustrated’s AI Writer Debacle

In what seems to be an about-face, forming a partnership with a company that prompted it crack down on AI-generated content....
Google Partners With the Company Behind Sports Illustrated’s AI Writer Debacle
Written by Matt Milano
  • In what seems to be an about-face, forming a partnership with a company that prompted it crack down on AI-generated content.

    AdVon Commerce was the company behind the Sports Illustrated’s AI debacle, in which articles were written by AI instead of real authors. The scandal led the magazine to end its relationship with AdVon. At the same time, Google announced plans to tackle “spammy, low-quality content.” Google said at the time:

    We’ve long had a policy against using automation to generate low-quality or unoriginal content at scale with the goal of manipulating search rankings. This policy was originally designed to address instances of content being generated at scale where it was clear that automation was involved.

    Today, scaled content creation methods are more sophisticated, and whether content is created purely through automation isn’t always as clear. To better address these techniques, we’re strengthening our policy to focus on this abusive behavior — producing content at scale to boost search ranking — whether automation, humans or a combination are involved. This will allow us to take action on more types of content with little to no value created at scale, like pages that pretend to have answers to popular searches but fail to deliver helpful content.

    Despite taking that stand, it appears Google Cloud is now partnered with AdVon to launch the latter’s AdVonAI tool on Google Cloud Marketplace.

    “Bringing AdVonAI to Google Cloud Marketplace will help customers quickly deploy, manage, and grow the solution on Google Cloud’s trusted, global infrastructure,” said Dai Vu, Managing Director, Marketplace & ISV GTM Programs at Google Cloud. “AdVon Commerce can now securely scale and support customers on their digital transformation journeys.”

    “Having our solution on Google Cloud Marketplace is only a starting point for customers,” Vlad Barshai, AdVon CTO said. “Our endpoints only scratch the surface of what we’ve proven in full-scale product enrichment partnerships.”

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