Available WordPress AI plugins & services are starting to stack up like NFT’s in 2021.
WPAI Universe lists 50+ AI resources for WordPress and wp.org has 116 results for the search term ’chatgpt’ at the time of this writing. For over a year, WordPress has been a natural pairing for a lot of the sane use cases for AI. Plugins like BerthaAI were at ground zero for creating an augmented writing experience before OpenAI opened the flood gates on consumer AI tooling.
Companies like Elementor are starting to implement AI into their customer’s website building experience. You can use their AI bot to fix content, adjust CSS, and even write custom snippets of code.
Seven years ago, Matt Mullenweg encouraged us to “Learn Javascript deeply.” In a recent Post Status message, Mullenweg prompted us with a new forecast: “spend as much time leveraging AI as possible.“
When he stood on stage and told us to learn Javascript, a heavy investment in Gutenberg’s block experience followed from Automattic. Does this mean we’ll see the same investment riding the coattails of AI?
What’s on the line for Automattic?
Aside from the hype (although this time Matt says this is not a hype cycle) and potential to raise new capital — Automattic can’t afford to lose out on the relevancy race.
Believe me, I’m still bullish on WordPress, but newbies onboarding into the web don’t get super excited about WordPress. Especially if they talk to someone who’s been running a WordPress website for years. There are a lot of alternatives, good and bad, open source and closed source, for new users to invest in.
WordPress/Automattic missed out on the page building experience other companies were leading the charge on dating back 8 – 10 years. Wix and Squarespace are far easier and user friendly for the mom & pop website. Beaver Builder and Elementor pioneered an enjoyable and scalable way to page building for WordPress. This lag in time is why we have what we have with Gutenberg + Full Site Editing today.
Imagine a world where ChatGPT builds you a website that includes a CMS backend. Imagine it’s all learned from WordPress. Take all of the good pieces of WordPress and just…automagically build it:
- Who cares if it’s Javascript, PHP, HTML, and MySQL?
- Who cares if 1000’s of people launch a website like that and ChatGPT builds it a 1000 different ways?
- Who cares where it’s hosted when ChatGPT plugin into AWS just dumps that code off into the cloud?
Automattic will care. WordPress (we) will care.
This is the relevancy race that WordPress can’t afford lose. A whole open source movement tailored around a set of coding and advocacy ideals that could vanish before the last chapter of Dune is sent to theaters.
It is the single best use case I’ve seen of ChatGPT — or whatever they are using
Seth Godin on Automattic’s AI
What’s this top-secret Automattic AI plugin?
In a recent episode of the Tim Ferris podcast, Seth Godin guest hosts to chat about his new book, The Song of Significance: A New Manifesto for Teams.
We know Seth uses WordPress and we know Mullenweg is friendly with Seth, as he attended State of the Word 2022. What we learn in this podcast episode is that he’s also tested a top-secret WordPress plugin (maybe service?) that leverages AI.
Seth says, “It is the single best use case I’ve seen of ChatGPT — or whatever they are using — being implemented in a way where it’s not just a talking llama. It’s actually: Oh, yeah! I need this!”
Tim did lead with questioning if this was public knowledge or not, stating he had seen some “screenshots of it.”
Here’s the full transcript of the 44-second clip:
[00:00:00] Seth: Have you seen what his team has built with chat G P T for blogs. Has he shown you the version yet?
[00:00:06] Tim: I don’t know if it’s public. I have seen screenshots, but yeah. Is it public?
[00:00:10] Seth: I don’t know. It’s not public, but we’re only talking so we’re allowed to talk.
[00:00:15] Tim: Okay, go for it. So if you wanna talk,
[00:00:19] Seth: I was just gonna say it is the single best use I have seen of chat.
[00:00:24] GPT or whatever they’re using, being implemented in a way where it’s not just, you know, a talking llama. It’s actually, oh yeah, I need this.
[00:00:35] Tim: Yeah, for sure. They create some amazing products. So yes, that’ll be the The teaser. The teaser for people. Yeah, for things to come.
[00:00:43] Seth: I’m just here for the hype.
When will Automattic launch this new AI plugin?
You might notice in the featured image of this post, Seth has an AI search feature on his site. You can try it here. It’s possible this is the Automattic service. A search feature that summarizes the search result for an end user.
Hype or not, I believe Automattic needs to make a serious play in the AI landscape, much quicker than it took them to get into page building race. Will it be more than images and text generation? A writing aide? The search feature I mentioned? If you have thoughts about this topic, please share this post on social and comment on what you think Automattic will launch.
That’s it for today’s episode, don’t forget to share share share this episode with others and jump on the mailing list 👇
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