Recently, Sam Sifton, who hosts The Morning newsletter for The New York Times, published a letter to his readers with an unusual subject line, “Who’s Writing This?”
His prompt was a new book called “The Future of Truth,” written by Steven Rosenbaum with significant AI assistance. The Times reviewed the book and found more than half a dozen misattributed or entirely fabricated quotes conjured by the AI, including one attributed to tech journalist Kara Swisher. Swisher’s response said not only was the quote wrong, but “I also sound like I have a stick up my butt.”
Rosenbaum’s defense that the hallucinations “serve as a warning about the risks of AI-assisted research and verification” is the kind of sentence that would be more convincing if it appeared in a different book.
Sifton used the moment to tell his readers something he clearly felt they deserved to hear directly. The Morning is built by humans, for humans. His team may use AI to find information that gets verified elsewhere. They may use it for editorial logistics, buying time for more reporting, but the thought-making, the question-asking, the deep reading, and the writing that follows – those are tasks performed by journalists free of chips. “I write fueled by adrenaline and fear of errors,” he told his readers. “And I promise you that will never change.”
What Google’s Guidance Actually Says
In February 2023, Danny Sullivan and Chris Nelson published Google’s guidance on AI-generated content. The position, which has not meaningfully changed since and was reinforced again recently in Matt Southern’s reporting on Google’s new AI search guide, is this: Google’s ranking systems aim to reward original, high-quality content that demonstrates E-E-A-T (expertise, experience, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness). The focus is on the quality of content, not how it is produced.
That sounds, on a quick reading, like a green light for AI content. It isn’t, or at least it isn’t a green light without conditions that matter enormously.
Google’s guidance specifically says that using automation to generate content with the primary purpose of manipulating search rankings violates its spam policies. And it draws an analogy that SEO professionals should analyze and evaluate: about a decade before the 2023 guidance was written, there were understandable concerns about content farms, which mass-produced large volumes of human-generated content. No one thought it reasonable to ban all human-generated content. Instead, Google improved its systems to reward quality. The helpful content system, the E-E-A-T framework, the information gain patent, the ongoing Quality Rater Guidelines updates through 2025 – all of it is the same enforcement mechanism, applied again, at greater sophistication.
Rosenbaum’s book is exactly the kind of content that Google’s systems are designed to identify and discount. Not because it used AI, but because it used AI carelessly, without the verification, the original reporting, and the editorial accountability that Google’s quality signals are trained to detect.
Sifton’s newsletter is exactly the kind of content those same systems are designed to reward. Not because it is human-generated, but because it is produced by people with genuine expertise, direct experience, and accountability to a specific audience. It is built by humans, for humans, in precisely the sense Google’s helpful content guidance has always intended.
Will Sifton’s Letter Change Anything?
The question at the center of this commentary is whether Sifton’s look at AI’s expanding role will change what Google is doing, change how practitioners write for AI, or change how they win in AI visibility.
The honest answer is no, not directly, and that’s the point.
Google’s guidance has been consistent since February 2023. It was consistent before that in spirit, through Panda in 2011, through E-A-T, through the Helpful Content Update in 2022, through the transition to E-E-A-T later that year. What changes is only the acuity with which people spot it on the horizon.
What Sifton’s letter does, that Google’s technical documentation cannot, is make the human cost of the alternative legible. Rosenbaum’s Kara Swisher hallucination is not an edge case or a technical failure. It is what happens when the thought-making is outsourced entirely, when the question-asking stops, when no one is writing fueled by adrenaline and fear of errors. It is a book about the future of truth that cannot be trusted.
For SEO professionals, the practical implication has not changed since Amit Singhal’s 23 Panda questions in 2011. Does the article provide original content or information, original reporting, original research, or original analysis? Does it have the kind of quality you’d expect to see referenced by a magazine, encyclopedia, or book? Would you be comfortable giving this to your editor and putting your name on it?
Sifton’s promise to his readers is that he would. That accountability is not a stylistic choice. It is the entire mechanism by which trust is built with an audience, and by which Google’s systems learn to surface content worth surfacing.
The Real Lesson
AI is not indifferent. It is responsive, adaptive, and improving faster than any previous technology transition in the industry’s history. That’s exactly what makes it useful and exactly what makes the question of how you use it so consequential.
But the standards that determine whether content earns trust, from readers and from Google’s ranking systems alike, do not move on AI’s schedule. They have been moving in the same direction for as long as Google has existed. Every approach that has assumed those standards would yield to scale, to automation, and to the next optimization trick has found the same thing.
They don’t yield. They move right along as though nothing happened.
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