If you’ve been following the endless chaos of Google Updates over the past year, you’re well aware that Google considers original images in a piece of content as a signal that the author of the content had “first hand experience” with whatever the subject is–whether it’s a product they’re reviewing, a destination they’re writing about, or whatever. And that’s a good thing in my opinion, as their opinion on that subject is vastly more valuable if they’ve actually held the product, visited the destination, etc.
That unfortunately caused many websites–who were using stock photos, or photos from a hotel or visitors’ bureau image library–to take it in the shorts late last summer/fall.
Google’s Reverse Image Search gives you a peek into their ability to spot what other websites an image is present on, and it’s pretty impressive. You can rename the image file, resize it, adjust the contrast, change from JPG to PNG, and even make some pretty significant changes to the image and it doesn’t fool Google.
AI to the rescue!…in the form of AI-generated images. The timing couldn’t be better, as right when sites got slaughtered for using stock photos, apps like DALL-E and MidJourney could generate an image for you based on prompts that Google saw as unique. Reverse Image Search would show no other sites with the image.
That all came screeching to a halt yesterday, when Google somewhat cryptically announced that they can detect AI-generated imagery. Barry Schwarts, in this Search Engine Roundtable article published July 9, 2024, showed that they have a variable compositeWithTrainedAlgorithmicMedia that indicates whether or not the image is AI-generated.
Given that Google wants to see signals that the content creator has first-hand experience with their subject, I cannot possibly imagine that they’d consider an AI-generated image an indication of this in your content.