In recent years AI is bringing a new kinda revolution to the world. For some of us AI is already become a part and parcel of our daily life. As local guide we can get a tons of help from AI. But my question is , Are we allowed to get help from AI in terms of local guiding? If we’re then,
a) What are the guidelines should we follow when using AI?
b) Are there any specific dos and don’ts for us to ensure the quality and integrity of our contributions in the context of AI?
c) How can we collaborate with AI algorithms to improve the overall mapping experience while maintaining the human touch?
As active Local Guides we have been dealing with AI systems for a very long time. Such systems are employed to approve our edits, they check our reviews for spam, and our photos get evaluated on how good and helpful they are.
The past few months have made generative AI a lot more available. These include systems that will generate texts that sounds great with perfect grammar about almost any topic. Most are not really intelligent they are just pretty good at guessing what the next word should be. Most are trained by low paid labour. So it is not artificial intelligence but intelligence from under paid people and a lot of computer power
We have seen cases where Local Guides have made posts here on Connect. Deceptively perfect English but the content were very generic and wrong on details related to the program and Google Maps specifics. So much so that it was super easy to see and detect.
Also, generative AI has been used to write reviews on Google Maps. They are in my experience harder to detect.
I use AI to improve some of my texts before posting them here on Connect. Especially https://quillbot.com/ seems super helpful.
I’m not aware that Google Maps has issued any guidelines or recommendations on the use of AI.
But I would recommend that you don’t use it to earn more points, or write text for you that are not reflecting your personal experiences. This aspect is already regulated. Our reviews needs too be authentic and based on personal experiences. So in some ways AI generated reviews are not allowed. But if you use AI only to polish your writing and spelling I believe it is okay.
As @MortenCopenhagen mentioned we’re using AI for years on Google Maps. The AI learns from our contributions and over time, we learn how to deal with AI decisions. There are lots of articles on Connect about how to bests in each field of contribution which also be good from the automated system perspective.
But increasing the usage of generative AI by people is definitely something that should be considered to have good control over the contents on Google Maps to keep it genuine. I was also going to write a post about it.
This is part of my concern that spammers may write reviews generated by AI and this will decrease the reliability of reviews during the time.
