Article spinning is a writing technique that creates what deceitfully appears to be new content by replacing words in pre-existing works. It is commonly done by websites for search engine optimization (SEO) and by students committing plagiarism.
Content spinning replaces specific words, phrases, sentences, or even entire paragraphs with synonyms to produce slight variations with each spin — also known as Rogeting. This process can be manual or automated. While basic techniques produce hard-to-read articles, sophisticated techniques can produce readable articles which seem original upon cursory review. Spin-generated documents are superficially different but can prove uninformative, infuriating the reader.[1]
Automatic rewriting can change the meaning of a sentence through the use of words with similar but subtly different meanings to the original. For example, the word "picture" could be replaced by the word "image" or "photo". Thousands of word-for-word combinations are stored in either a text file or database thesaurus. This ensures that a large percentage of words are different from the original article.[citation needed]
Simpler automated techniques cannot recognize context or grammar. Poorly-done article spinning can create unidiomatic phrasing that no human writer would choose. Some spinning may substitute a synonym with the wrong part of speech when encountering a word that can be used as either a noun or a verb, use an obscure word that is only used within very specific contexts, or improperly substitute proper nouns.[citation needed] For example, while "great" can be a synonym for "good", "Great Britain" does not have the same meaning as "Good Britain".
One type of article spinning is "spintax". Spintax (or spin syntax) uses a marked-up version of text to indicate which parts of the text should be altered or rearranged. The different variants of one paragraph, one or several sentences, or groups of words or words are marked. Spintax can be complex, with many depth levels (nested spinning). It acts as a tree with large branches, then many smaller branches up to the leaves. To create readable articles out of spintax, a specific software application chooses any of the possible paths in the tree; this results in variations of the base article without significant alteration to its meaning.[citation needed]
As of 2017, there are a number of websites which will automatically spin content for an author, often with the end goal of attracting viewers to a website in order to display advertisements to them.[citation needed]404 Media reported in June 2024 that the black hat SEO industry had adopted generative AI tools, making it easy to "[create] an entirely autonomous, ChatGPT-powered technology news site that steals other people’s original reporting for just $365.63."[2]
Manual spinning
Because of the problems with automated spinning, website owners may pay writers or specific companies to perform higher quality spinning manually. Writers may also spin their own articles, allowing them to sell the same articles with slight variations to a number of clients or to use the article for multiple purposes, for example as content and also for article marketing.
Plagiarism and duplicate content
In academia, article spinning is sometimes used by students as a way to plagiarise other people's work while evading detection from their teachers or automated checking devices such as Turnitin or its IThenticate system.[3] There are many websites offering text-spinning services to students. Unlike large language models, they are not designed to produce natural sounding writing; rather, they are designed to take a source text and preserve the meaning and structure, but swap out enough synonyms such that plagiarism remains undetected.[4]
Google representatives say that Google doesn't penalize websites that host duplicate content, but the advances in filtering techniques mean that duplicate content will rarely feature well in SERPs, which is a form of penalty.[5] In 2010 and 2011, changes to Google's search algorithm targeting content farms aim to penalize sites containing significant duplicate content.[6] In this context, article spinning might help, as it's not detected as duplicate content.
In November 2023, Seth Weintraub of 9to5Google reported that Google News was "riddled with AI copies of actual articles" stolen from sites like Electrek. LLM-generated clone articles monetized via Google AdSense were posted "[w]ithin minutes" of the original article's publication.[7]
In January 2024, 404 Media reported that journalists' articles were being overtaken by LLM-generated clones in Google News rankings.[8][9][10] Google responded that it did not have a policy against AI-generated articles because it focused on quality instead of method of production,[8][11] and claimed only certain types of filtered searches were affected.[12]
Criticisms
Article spinning is a way to create what looks like new content from existing content. As such, it can be seen as unethical, whether it is paraphrasing of copyrighted material (to try to evade copyright), deceiving readers into wasting their time for the benefit of the spinner (while not providing additional value to them), or both.[13]
References
↑ Gossman, Kathleen (June 15, 2012), Spinning gets you nowhere.
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