Hey everyone.
Welcome again to another episode of WP Product Talk.
Um, my name is Matt Cromwell and I am, uh, one of the co-founders of Give WP.
And, uh, have been building products in WordPress for,
uh, eight, nine years or so.
I need to just figure out the number and stop, like guessing.
I feel like every time that comes up, I, I have to scratch my head.
It's like asking me how old my kids are.
Um, but, um, and, um, I like to be able to talk about products and how
to grow them and how to do better with them, uh, in WordPress specifically.
And, uh, another person who likes to do that is Katie.
Keith.
Um, Katie, you wanna tell the world about.
. Yep.
So I'm Katie, c e o, and co-founder at Bar two plugins.
Um, we've been selling plugins since 2016.
You see Matt, I don't have to do maths.
If you just say the year, um, year.
I like, um, working out, um, new ways to, um, sell the plugins and build the
business and also help other people with their own WordPress product businesses as.
Exactly, and this is WP Pro where we talk about all those things
and we bring somebody smart and intelligent who uses years also,
um, uh, to talk about this subject.
And today we have the benefit of having Andrew Palmer with us.
Andrew, tell us a little bit about yourself.
Hello.
Hello, I'm Andrew Palmer.
I'm the co-founder of bertha.ai, but I used to run the elegant marketplace.com,
which I sold to in motion.
So sold a lot of plugins, helped a lot of vendors.
Um, Sell their plugins as well, including WP Feedback, which is now Atin io and.
I'm joined by little Berth, so thank you.
. Say hello.
That's excellent.
Nice.
Oh my goodness.
That's some good swag right there.
Um, there's some child in the world that has that and is choking on it right now.
Probably.
It's, it's unique.
It's the fu It's the only one.
She's the only one.
Ah, are you gonna do more?
No.
That's
invaluable.
If you do sponsor something though, then you should do that is a good
idea.
Yeah, yeah, it's, she's great.
She's handmade and um, she looks great, doesn't
she?
That's amazing.
That's fun.
So if you, um, if you haven't figured it out yet, the subject today is artificial
intelligence, uh, specifically using AI to grow your WordPress product business.
Um, and, um, it's a subject that of course is trending and interesting because
of chat G B T and things like that.
Um, I've been really fascinated just digging into it all and finding out
how long of a history artificial intelligence actually has in tech.
It's not really a new thing at all, it's just getting a little bit more
consumer oriented as of recent.
Um, so, uh, we brought Andrew on to talk about it because
he's the one who's really, um, been doing this in this product.
Um, not the only one, but one of the big ones.
Um, With, uh, Bertha AI in particular.
Um, and, uh, I'm excited to to jump in and see how things are going.
Uh, if you're watching right now, uh, thanks for being here and, um, you can
reach out to us and ask your questions as well, and we'd like to answer them
on screen, so feel free to add them into, uh, whatever chat box you might
ha happen to have in front of you.
YouTube, Facebook, um, Twitter.
Um, or on Twitter, we're also watching the hashtag WP Product Talk.
So, um, any and all ways to reach out is fair game.
So topic first is why is this an important subject for WordPress product owners, uh,
artificial intelligence in the product?
Um, who wants to jump in first?
Let's, let's let, let's let Andrew be last on this one.
Um, because, uh, I can tell you that so far my experiences are, Small, but I just
see tons of tons and tons of potential.
I've been hearing lots of people talk about ways that
they might want to implement it.
Um, Andrew was just telling me about some conversations he had about
LearnDash on, on my side of things.
Um, I can tell you that, um, I'm not gonna go into detail, um, but Cadence is
working on some really interesting things with artificial intelligence right now.
I personally have just been using it mostly for content generation type
ideas, uh, for marketing purposes.
Um, I've tried to imagine ways that it might be helpful to
nonprofits, um, and donations, but I haven't been able to figure out
the best way to leverage it there.
Um, but, um, I just see it as a, a huge potential, lots of opportunity,
um, for, for products in general.
If it, if, if the, if the shoe fits, of course, it really depends on the product.
So I can keep it short.
Katie, what's your thoughts?
Yeah, it's basically the trending topic, um, of the last few months, isn't it?
You really couldn't put anything in tech that was trending more than AI right now.
Um, triggered of course by chat G P T, but in no ways limited to that.
And I think, um, full WordPress product businesses, it brings, um,
two different areas of opportunity.
One applies to all of us, which is the internal, um, workings of our.
Um, there's lots of different opportunities that we need to think
about of how it changes our working processes, whether that's marketing,
coding, design, or anything else really, it has so many different strengths to
it that we all need to think about.
And in addition to that, there's the opportunity for AI related products,
which is what Andrew, of course, um, is at the front line of, at the.
Yeah, absolutely.
If there was, if you didn't see we, Andrew and I had a fun tweet thread comment last
week of how I generated the description of this podcast with I think five
different, um, AI platforms, . Um, and I will say I think it was one of the best.
Podcast descriptions I've ever written for sure.
And I think it just was like, it felt like I had like four different
editors standing over my shoulder.
I was like, man, I better get this right.
So, um, Andrew, what's your take?
Why is this so valid, relevant, important for WordPress product owners
right now?
Well, for WordPress product owners particularly, so let's, let's just
analyze who a WordPress product owner is.
They're generally a, a freelancer that's want, wants to scratch their
own itch, so they build a plugin.
Mm-hmm.
. , they know pretty much nothing about marketing.
They don't know how to do a strategy.
Uh, they don't know how to write a blog post or they dunno what to to write about.
They don't know how to do some research maybe.
So with AI you can.
Basically write a blog post about how do I solve this particular
issue with this particular plugin?
And the AI will cut, will give you some marketing ideas.
How do I build a strategy around the plugin?
Or how do I build a marketing strategy around it?
You can literally ask.
. Um, in my case, Bertha AI's got chat as well, so you can ask in the
chat, how do I build a strategy for this particular plugin which solves
this particular problem, right?
Yeah.
And that, and, and she'll come up with the answers for you.
And there's many other UMIs out there.
Most of them actually, uh, are layer or application layers on top of open ai.
Mm-hmm.
. Um, so we're all using GPT three, including ber, and we are
using a couple of other engines.
Open AI has had its own problems over the last few weeks.
I mean, ironically, Microsoft put 10 billion into them, um, and they did
a similar thing with Skype, and about three weeks later, Skype just crashed.
So, um, it's just ironic and it's, it's, I'm sure it's a total co coincidence,
but open AI has been crashing pretty much every day for the last week and a half.
So we've mitigated that.
Using a different system.
So when open AI crashes, we automatically swap across to another application,
which is, uh, it's not perfect, but it's, you know, it's getting
there and it is working for us.
But the, for product vendors like Katie, you know, when, when Katie
first started, suddenly had the spring of the, you know, the, this fresh
idea about what she wanted to do, Katie, what was your biggest problem?
It was looking at a blank piece of paper saying, how do I describe this?
as a solution.
How do I get it across that it's a cost effective solution?
Why would somebody want to install something that they don't know
Will is going to work for them on their own WordPress install?
And I think that's the benefit to, to vendors.
Let's not forget that Pippin's piping himself when, when Pippin's plugins were
were sourced when he built Ed Digital downloads, I don't think he ever imagine.
He'd have, uh, you know, a hundred thousand users or 50,000 users
or whatever, and the support that goes along with that.
So, what's happening now, particularly with Aaron Edwards, who you had on last
week, um, at Twitter, he's now developing a system where people can easily upload
their data for their help files or their FAQs or their knowledge base.
And then that will build a, a chatbot that's specifically within their.
, um, help desk, and that'll be first line of defense, if you like.
So, you know, the, the power of AI to.
Uh, product vendors be bigger than they actually are, even when they're
first starting, is quite amazing.
So we've always said as, as, as plugin developers.
And in fact, I remember having a conversation with Katie months ago
when I bought one of her, her plugins a year ago even, where I couldn't do
something and it's because I didn't read the manual and really, mm-hmm.
what, what I should have done is just looked at and she said in nicest, nice.
Possible way.
Read the manual, you know, so it was, but if you have any problems,
you can't read the manual.
Come back to me.
And that's the issue is now we don't have to read the manual
because we can ask a chatbot.
How do I get over this issue?
Um,
a chat.
How to read the manual for
us.
. Yeah.
We're building stuff for They lie
though, don't they?
They make stuff up.
They think every work.
For example, if you train them properly, Katie, you know, if
you train your, yes, that's true.
Your bot on all your documentation.
Then it, then it will produce an answer for the user to say, how do I do this?
Or, I've got a problem with this.
And, and it will analyze and it'll generate some text and say,
well, this could be the problem.
Go here and, and actually produce a link to the, to the part of the
knowledge base that people need.
So anybody that's got a highly developed knowledge base, they'll, they'll take
advantage of, of us and, and of what Aaron's doing and building them a
chatbot, that will be their first line.
, which would be great.
That's, that's one of the,
didn't he show that to us, Katie?
After.
afterwards, right?
He didn't bring it up.
Did he bring it up during the show?
No, he asked, he actually asked me to talk about it.
we're we technically competitors?
But I mean, I love what Aaron's doing.
He's, he's, he's doing similar to stuff to us because it's all in open
ai, you know, so we can, we can train on models and stuff like that, but
you know, effectively, , if I'm a sole plugin developer or plugin vendor, my
life has now changed because I now know how I can now got somebody to help me
do the marketing, which is AI driven.
And I've got somebody to, to be my first line of defense, which is AI driven.
Mm-hmm.
, uh, and I've also got product development if I decide to use
Codex to help me write my code.
Um, you know, so there's lots of things going on with AI that will help, uh, all
software product developers actually.
in the WordPress community we are, I'm seeing lots of people write lots of
little plugins to just help themselves actually, rather than just sell them on.
Yeah.
Yeah, absolutely.
I, I think he, he actually showed it to us after we had like, turned off
the recording and it, I was like, this is something that I want, like Yeah.
For, especially for any of the stellar products, uh, for our documentation
section or one thing we do on the give side, um, on the support form is we,
we, before you can even see the form it.
Hey, like, here's a, a quick search of our docs.
Like, is your answer, um, is your question answered here?
Um, I could totally imagine, um, having the chat box there first, um, and then
it's like, have I answered your question?
And you're like, no.
Okay.
Then you could fill out a support ticket.
Um, well, can you, can you imagine in the future that you'll actually
be talking to an AI generated.
Avatar.
So I would like to just imagine me as the avatar, and you ask me, you can
verbally ask me a question via whatever medium you are, you are doing, and
I will hand created bot right there.
That, that, that one is the chat bot?
Yeah.
A live chat.
Yeah.
Where, where's your, where's your birthday bot?
Where'd it go?
That's the one we, we should imagine we're all talking to the Bertha.
Yes.
I dunno.
She wants, she says no, she says not.
Katie, what do you think?
Does that, is that, I'll make one.
I'll make one for your daughter Katie.
I know that you are just, you're eyeing it up.
. I'm worried that he's the only one in the world.
You have two business partners.
They at least need one.
I have
one business partner and he is not getting it and he's got two kids, so that's it.
Ok.
Not having it.
Katie, what do you think if, if, if all of our customers were
interacting with, uh, Bertha bots, um, instead of technical support
technicians, what do you think of that?
In theory, yes.
I have personally not seen it yet.
All I have had is trying to talk to my bank or something and being frustrated
and because I think there's a lot of, um, people outside of WordPress
have integrated this years before it was ready and you would both have
had that experience of these box.
It's like, for God sake, you can't do anything.
Um, just tell.
Let me speak to a real person.
So yes, if the bots genuinely has that level of knowledge so that they could be,
uh, first line of support, just like a tier one support engineer would be, then
I'm all for that and I'd, I'd like to spend some time testing the latest tools
to see if they're at that stage yet.
I just haven't personally seen it yet because I haven't done that.
Yeah, the, the, the term I keep hearing bantered around a lot is generative ai.
And that to me is kind of why I can't imagine it actually a answering super
technical support questions quite yet.
Um, cause I think it's really challenging to, into.
Generate actual actionable responses to technical problems
based on the documentation as is.
Now, of course, like what you were saying, you have to train them, uh,
to be smart enough to do those things.
Um, we could literally.
inform the bot by the actual tickets.
Um, and not just the online docs, like throw help scout at the
whole bot and see what happens.
Um, that would be interesting.
Um, well cause lot of data.
It's a ton of data and there's plenty times where we are
training our technicians to use.
Canned responses, uh, but to customize them to the situation.
Uh, I imagine that's not that different from training an AI bot, right, Andrew?
Absolutely not.
So if, if somebody asked a question, it's a detailed question because
in support, I do support as well.
And I'm sure Katie's done the fair share of support.
It's, it's, it's like getting blood out of a stone from some people when they say.
. It's not working well.
Not what's not working, right.
So you, you then have to get an explanation from them.
So one of the things that we are training the bots to do is to read the intent of
the email, understand the frustration, because exclamation marks, um, uh,
capital letters, all this kind of stuff.
Become, come back empathically and say, I understand this.
I understand the situation is not, not making you particularly happy.
However, if you would like to go to this part of our.
Documentation.
This, this will probably help you.
If it doesn't help you, then please come back to me and I'll get a live
support agent to, to deal with you.
Yeah, but also part of the, the, the training is the live support
agents have got masses of notes.
solutions, whatever, those can all go into the knowledge base as well.
Those can all go into the training model and eventually that first line.
So, and, and lots of people will say, well, you know, what's gonna happen to
your first line support guys and girls?
And you'll say, well actually they'll become second tier and third tier.
Mm-hmm.
, their job gets better because they are then dealing with real issues rather
than, , I installed the plugin as a theme, or I installed the theme as a plugin.
You know, and we've all come across rather than just read
the doc Andrew, rather than
thinking that it's been, you know, there's no CSS file there.
Well, that's because you installed it as a plugin, but you know,
all those kind of things.
And you've gotta be sympathetic with them, uh, with, with people, because, What we
don't realize or what we don't really understand as technical people, you know,
even the technical Twitter and we're all into in support and we're all doing,
you know, the developing these plugins.
We don't actually.
Understand what a non-technical person goes through day in, day out.
You know, I had somebody install Bertha today on Chrome, who's not, who's
definitely not a technical person, and I saw some issues around the installation,
which I thought was very, very simple.
It's like two click installation where if, if there was a w was an
issue that ha happily this person looked around and made sure that.
Got it.
Right.
But I've now seen a way to improve that for a non-technical,
a totally non-technical user.
We, we, we assume too much sometimes as plugin developers
and, and theme developers.
Yeah.
So we, we make sure that we've, we make it as simple as possible for
people to install our stuff and use it.
So I've.
Yeah, I've gotten a little bit off script here just cuz it's interesting
and I think we wanna flesh out, uh, the whole scope of what this is.
But like, if we have like one sentence, uh, why is this an
important topic for WP product owners?
Um, let's go around the horn and then we'll jump into story time.
Um, Katie, why is this important for WP product?
Because it's an opportunity for us all.
Yep.
Absolutely.
Andrew.
Uh, growth.
That's it.
Ah.
, ah, gimme two sentences.
Short sentence.
. Well, it, it, it will help you grow as a developer.
Mm-hmm.
a product owner and a marketer.
So it will help you grow basically.
So, and, and it will help your product grow.
And if, if you integrate AI into your product, that will
also keep it sticky as well.
Mm-hmm.
. Mm-hmm.
nice.
People will want to use
it every day.
Yeah, I think, um, generally because keeping fresh, because I do see this as
becoming a tool that is in everybody's tool chest going forward, um Sure.
In one form or another.
So making sure you're on top of things going forward.
Um, we have one questionnaire and I do wanna make sure we highlight
questions whenever they come up.
Um, I'm not sure what this means exactly.
Maybe Andrew, you have any insight on this?
Is there a plugin for.
Not Microsoft.
Well, I mean, ber uh, Chrome Extension works with all Microsoft online products.
So PowerPoint, um, word.
Excel, it, it, you know, Bertha just works because she's in a web browser.
She'll work with, with all the Microsoft Live products and Google Docs and mm-hmm.
things like that.
Mm-hmm.
, so anything that's web browser.
My, my, our, our extension, Bertha's extension, I know because
obviously I'm the owner of it and, um, I know that it works.
In any web browser with anything like Notion, Mundy, um, mm-hmm.
, WordPress, Shopify, every, every web browser based thing where you
need to generate text or images.
So it works in everything.
That's why we did it as a prime extension as well as a a WordPress plugin.
Nice.
Cool.
Keep the questions coming folks.
Um, I wanna jump into story time and I think, uh, it's important, um, when
we are talking about our experiences to really say like, openly, like, I
haven't built anything with AI to date.
Um, but it doesn't mean I don't have insights into what
products can do with them.
So let's talk a little bit about our personal experiences of, uh, using
AI in different ways and, um, and what that might mean for other folks.
Um, Katie, you want to go first?
Yep.
Sure.
So I don't think it matters if you haven't built anything with it because
of the two strands that we've got.
Um, so it's about how, um, you've used it to, um, build your business and
the businesses that you work with.
So in my case, I personally use it partly for marketing and partly for.
Just my own tasks.
Um, with marketing, uh, I use it all the time.
I mostly use it to write, uh, outlines for articles.
I will always flesh them out myself using my product knowledge.
I would never assign an article to a writer that came straight from
chat g p t, um, but it really does save time and also add ideas that I
probably didn't come up with on my own.
Um, I use it to rewrite things.
I'm actually quite a good writer, but it still.
Um, something that I've missed and can improve on.
The wording that might be, um, writing a sensitive email, um, to a
team member or something like that.
It actually, often, this makes me sound terrible, but it adds a human angle,
which my own writing doesn't have.
So the robot is clearly more human than me, uh, by adding humanity to the words.
Wow.
I didn't know this was gonna be like, confessional time.
This is amazing.
Yeah, I won't be more specific, um, than about the ways I've used I
shoes from the hit, basically.
That's what she's saying.
Yeah.
. . Um, I use it things like rewriting tweets.
Often I don't use what it comes up with because it is way too
boastful or something, but it's interesting to have another.
Perspective, it's good for coming up with alternate headline ideas, and
in fact, many of the headlines for the shows of this podcast are used.
Chat G p T to draft and chose it, chose the best option.
So those are ways I use it.
But as the, um, business owner, I'm also, uh, thinking about
how my team can incorporate it.
So, for example, at the moment one of my developers is building some custom
reports for our e d D sites and, uh, about, cuz we don't have the business.
Information we need.
So I've asked him to look at different AI tools, um, in terms of speeding up that
process and um, automating it and so on.
I've talked to my marketing team about how they can be using it and
it is interesting cuz some people seem to be a bit threatened, whereas
others are willing to embrace it.
So I need to word it in a sensitive way.
I'm not trying to do them out of their jobs.
I'm trying to see how they can achieve even more, um mm-hmm without,
you know, having fewer people.
Yeah.
And um, we've had a new in-house designer start today, and I've also created
a task for him to look at how maybe AI might help with image generation,
particularly on like blog posts, social media posts, that kind of thing.
So I'm thinking more widely about how it could be used within the business.
. And of course there's something that's not my area, which is the whole development
side of things, and I haven't spoken yet with our plug-in developers about whether
they're using that and how they could use that in a positive way, um, for their
work.
Yep.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
My experiences are very similar, uh, in the sense, uh, I'm a, I'm a consumer.
Um, I just, uh, recently paid for chat g p t just cuz I'm impatient and I don't wanna
refresh the screen 25 times and exacerbate their problems with server load.
Um, but.
Uh, I think one of the things, I use it for like many ways.
I would just call it like an enhanced search engine because,
uh, for like a research purposes recently, I'm looking a lot into.
, um, net promoter score, uh, type stuff for, uh, customer experience and support.
Um, and I just have been, um, asking, uh, different chatbots like, uh, what's
the best way to implement Net Promoter score on an existing customer base?
Um, I like asking like human questions to the, for them to give
full responses and sometimes I, I say, Three sentences on this, or I
say write three paragraphs on this.
Um, one thing I, uh, I like on the way, uh, Microsoft being has implemented it
is it always, uh, sites, its sources.
Um, I really like that a lot.
Um, but I have found that their sources are usually three to four years old.
Usually I haven't found them, like citing new sources hardly
ever, which is interest.
. Um, and then, um, even, um, when I was putting together,
Description of this podcast.
What I really liked in when I was using Notion, which I know that all these
are all chat G P T, but the, their implementation makes it have a different
experience, which is interesting.
But when I did Notion, I said, write a paragraph on, uh, podcasts,
introducing Andrew Palmer, uh, talking about WordPress products.
Um, and it gave me a paragraph and then I said, now rewrite that par.
I just told it.
Rewrite the paragraph above with a Fleisch Kincaid score of sixth.
and it did it and it was really good.
I was really impressed.
So like, iterating on the responses as you go, uh, I think is really interesting.
Um, so those are, those have been my experiences too.
Um, I did try, one, one of 'em was write a plugin on how I can implement
SEO O Metatags on my WordPress site just to see if it would.
, you know, make me compete against Yos tomorrow.
Like let's, let's do that.
Um, and it was like, I can't write a plugin for you, but
here's how you would do it.
. Exactly.
Yeah.
I wanna, okay.
Well there's code, there's Codex, you know, you got Codex.
So how I use AI every day, obviously I'm, you know, we're, I'm testing the plugins,
uh, I'm testing implementations as well.
You know, as you say, we had a, I had, you know, I'm talking to learning management
people all the time about it, you know, write me a course description, uh,
write me a lesson on a particular site.
You know, I did the example I did for, for, um, the meeting that I had with
your guys was, You know, do me a course description on rock climbing and now give
me 10 lesson titles for rock climbing.
From that, from the lesson titles.
Write the lesson on that, that wrote the lesson.
And so, you know, and, and every time I show the power of AI to
people, Their, their heads have get, literally, they go, oh my goodness,
I've got to be able to use this.
So chat, G P T is great, don't get me wrong, but it, it's not the whole story.
You know, there are many, many UMIs out there that.
The ones that I don't like are the ones that will write you a two
and a half thousand word blog post instantaneously from a, from a thing.
I think that's the wrong way to go around it.
I think, you know, we've got to use them as writing assistance.
So for today, for instance, I was in a coaching, uh, day with a client who's
a marketing manager of, uh, a law firm that has seven separate offices.
So we used Rephrase a lot because we, we did, we wanted to tell
a similar story, but not the.
On each website.
And we also didn't want to get pen penalized for, um, duplicate content.
So we, we basically took some copy, rephrased it, put some localization
in it with seo, wrote some seo, meta metatags, and titles and meta
descriptions, and boom, you know, we've got the seven websites all.
but similar because they're, they're a similar brand.
So that's the power of AI is that you can use the generative, and why
it's called generative is to separate it, separate it from the AI of, say
Tesla, that you drive a car, you know that that will drive a car.
or the AI that will, will help a surgeon do a, a heart operation from Mars away.
So that, that's why it's pretty much called generative AI
because it is very specifically generating text and, and or images.
Um, which Bertha does both of in, in its own plugin and in the Chrome
extension as well, and, and improving all the time on what we can get outta.
generative AI it with prompts.
So, you know, a new skill is prompt writing.
Yeah.
Uh, part of what makes our plugin better than anybody else, in my view,
is that our prompts are excellent.
You know, we spent four months writing prompts from a website owner's
perspective because we've built.
4,000 websites between us, Vito and I, so we know what website owners want or
we felt we knew and then we built the prompts and then we're building more
prompts and, and educating Bertha more and more helping her learn the user as well.
So that's the benefit that I've got from it.
But I, you know, for instance, I'm now, I've got a, a web agency as well.
I'm now offering very quick website builds with.
because I can.
Yeah.
And that's, that's the benefit for a small, um, web design
agency or a web build agency.
Go into your templating stuff, do renter websites if you like, or
lease websites and say, okay, you can pay, pay for this over 18 months.
Here's your solution, Mrs.
Florist, because you haven't got a lot of money.
You know, you've literally got to.
A bouquet of flowers a month just to pay for this, this website,
that's what it's gonna cost you.
It's gonna cost you 85 good a month or 150 good a month to run this website.
But you don't have to worry about writing copy.
You don't have to worry about local seo.
You don't have to worry about anything.
And also with, uh, today, you know, with seven Google business pages,
we had to make them all different.
So we used AI to make them all different.
Yeah, again, similar but different.
So that's where, where I'm using ai, I'm making sure that people, um, can build
their businesses locally, uh, make sure that the content is not duplicated,
uh, but it says a similar message.
And also, you know, building images around.
Imagine building a blog post out and being able to generate images
whilst you are building that blog post out as, as an example.
, you know, it's, it's crazy.
That's, this is why it's so executing just the product.
Absolutely.
It's a productivity tool and that's what you've gotta think
of it as.
Mm-hmm.
. Yep.
Good question here from Jim Ross.
Um, do you think there are any ethical concerns with using AI
in WordPress product businesses?
And how can they be addressed?
Um, I'll just say there's always ethical concerns about everything
related to business, but, um, anybody gotta take on this?
, Katie in particular, like copyright concerns maybe, um, or.
I have tried to check chat beat G P T before, and I don't
think it does plagiarize.
It does what real writers do, which is combine things to create something new.
That's actually how a lot of humans write unless it's true creative writing.
Mm-hmm.
. Um, so I haven't found that source of issue.
Um, I did read.
A story.
Um, it was, I think there was like a shooting or something
and somebody got found out.
Have you heard about this?
That it said, um, there was an email that somebody wrote and it
said written by chat, g p t at the bottom and everybody Yeah.
Was up arm, uh, sorry, that's a really bad phrase.
Was really annoyed about that.
And, . But then when I read it, it wasn't that the email content was
wrong, it was that it was the, it was
the principal, the impression
principle of Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But I think the writing was appropriate from what I could gra gather.
Mm-hmm.
. So it's more about people's, I, um, prejudices, opinions, emotions.
Uh, if they think that a robot has written them a, a sensitive
email, they may not think it was genuine, even though actually it.
Um, because people think, oh, if it was written by ai, then the person
had no true input into it, which is not the correct way to use it.
Of course, as we've touched on,
Yeah, I mean that emailed, it's like a special letter from our
ceo o and founder, and then at the bottom generated by chat, g p t.
Like it just wouldn't go over very well.
or generated with the help.
You know, it, it depends whether or not the person is, um, you know, like Katie
was saying that she shoots from the hip, but, so sometimes she might use chat
GTP or so, or, or some, some other, um, AI to, to gentrify it really, or, you
know, make it a little bit more gentle or more sensitive, or IPA empathic.
I don't know what the, where, where's the ethical?
I don't.
I need to know what the ethical concerns are before.
Yeah.
Um, I answer that really, I dunno what ethical concerns are around ai.
There's been a lot of talk about it's got bias and, and it's inbuilt bias because
it's built by a certain demographic, but it's, uh, but it's also only
scanned 20 10% or 15% of the web anyway.
But the, I think where this, I think where Jim's aiming at is, is it copying stuff?
So more, more of the ethical stuff is coming from the arts generation.
Copyright.
So from the image generation.
But when I go to college and I learn, um, about the Renaissance and I learn about
Greek mythology or Greek, you know, the Greek statues and sculpture and all that
kind of stuff, I'm learning a style.
Production for, um, a painting, for a sculpture, for a design product.
Designers, you know, Steve Ives or whatever, you know, the, the guy
that designed the iPhone had ideas for years, um, about how he would,
how he would put things together.
He was inspired.
By other artists or other creatives or other product designers.
So with ai, all AI is doing is being inspired by everything that it's
scanned, everything that's in its database, but because it's not human
or it doesn't bleed when you cut it.
. Mm-hmm.
, it's copy, it's not inspiration.
Yeah.
And that's that.
I think that's the key.
But in, in, in the end, at the end of the day, generative AI can only produce
what it's learnt just like a human being.
We can only, yeah.
Be as creative as we can be from learning how to be creative.
There's never, yeah, there's no spontaneity.
I can't, I'm not born and then held in a box for 20 years and then I suddenly come.
as Van Goff.
Am I?
Yeah.
I can't.
Is this impossible?
I've gotta learn that process through education and
inspiration from other things.
So that's all generative.
I like That's true.
Same.
I
think for me.
Yeah.
For me, there's two, two things that stand out as, um, a little slippery slope ish.
Um, uh, the first one is really on the generative image side.
Uh, not so much content, but like the way that AI generates images.
Specifically around concerns that all of our images are out on the web and
all of our images might be used in ways that generate something that we
might not like, um, particularly well.
Um, and, uh, you know, if it, if something too closely resembles me.
Um, putting me in a position on an image that I don't want.
Like, uh, I, I don't love that idea.
Um, uh, but I know that a lot of folks are already digging into some of those
implications and what that might look like and how we might like somehow put
tags into the meta of images to prevent that type of thing, um, when it's your
likeness, um, and things like that.
So I think that is something to.
in mind.
Um, I have a really, the other one is, is on the content side.
Um, and, uh, specifically in education.
In the education realm.
I have a funny story where, My 16 year old, um, was asked to
write an essay, um, comparing Jesus of Nazareth with Spider-Man.
Um, I just thought it was a ridiculous prompt.
Uh, I was like, I cannot believe this is like a 10th grade, uh, prompt.
But all right.
I said, it's so ridiculous.
I, I, I decided I'm gonna show her a Chachi pt.
I said, you should just generate it from this.
Um, then you should change it.
Uh, it needs to be your own.
But that is exactly where the.
, the ethical side of things comes into play is if you, if you do try to just pass
off, um, content that you're either paid for or it's supposed to be a reflection
of your, of your effort, uh, uh, uh, or, uh, in, in, in a envir, excuse me, in a.
educational environment.
Um, you're trying to pass that off as your own when it's not.
Um, I think those are ethical concerns that are really important.
Um, especially even when it comes to like LearnDash.
Like, all right, let's generate a whole course on how to write
WordPress plugins with chat G B T, and then sell it for 25 bucks a pop.
You could do that for sure, and you don't even have to.
I think the part, I don't think that would be ethically sound to do it that way.
Um, you could, um, but I do think that there is also just the raw
marketplace that will put you in check.
Like, I don't think that people will enjoy that course particularly well and
you might get a lot of refunds for it.
Um, but uh, using it as a launching pad.
Thinking of ideas and putting together your own thoughts and
actually crafting something, uh, based on that is a different story.
So those are my two ethical
ones.
Um, well, I, well, I, was that an example you used from a, a school?
Did they asked to compare Jesus to, um, to Spain?
Did they really have Very old, yeah.
Um, yeah,
I mean, it was a religion course, so, um, pardon me, it was a, it
was a religion course, so, Okay.
Mm-hmm.
, still an odd thing
anyway, because none of these are in specific to ai, the ethical concerns.
Mm-hmm.
, plagiarism, um, image doctoring, uh, those sorts of things.
All of that, it applies to life in general.
Mm-hmm.
. Um, so AI might, AI might have exacerbated that, but we haven't really, I think
between us, come up with any issues that.
Specific to AI that are bringing new into the world that we haven't
already had to tackle in some other.
I
agree.
That's really, cause I don't, I mean, I don't, I agree with you, Katie.
There's nothing, there's nothing that hasn't been done by humanity, good or
bad, that AI has yet to, to recreate Yeah.
In, in yet to create something new that, that would, would cause somebody
to say there's an ethical concern here.
Yeah.
But we do, human beings naturally are bias.
They, they have bias.
And because of we've got bias, AI has bias because it learns from humans.
Right.
Eventually there will be, you know, there's, there's the, the
court that says there will be so much AI generated content.
But when AI res scrapes, whatever it res scrapes, it will actually be AI
writing, ai, writing ai, learning from ai.
So there will be no originality left in the world, but AI inception,
yeah, I'm not sure we're gonna be alive when that happens.
I think, I mean, I think we do have to acknowledge so that like while um,
those problems have existed, this.
Proliferate them in a way that wasn't available.
Like people can forge images, but I know that I couldn't reliably forge an image
before . Like I couldn't do something passable as a, as an actual image forgery.
Uh, but now suddenly tools like that are a lot more accessible, a lot more available.
, uh, to the common user.
I mean, it's the same thing with weapons.
Like when weapons are only helped by a few folks, they're,
they're only limitedly bad.
Um, but when you proliferate them across a whole population,
things will happen, is that AI will generate a screenplay
and then AI will make that.
Mm-hmm.
. Yeah.
That, that, that'll happen.
You know?
So Will sure will be, will be inundated with Ai . It's just so
we have to fi, we have to find some way to almost control it.
Will we be punished by Google and others for using AI-based content?
No.
, they've, they've said that as long as it's interesting.
Yeah, yeah.
Useful.
And, um, you know, I mean, I've always felt about SEO stuff.
If it's entertaining, educational, um, and useful, then you'll, it doesn't
matter whether it's AI generated or not, it will be indexed by Google.
Simple
as that.
. Yeah.
I mean, Google has its own AI that it's, uh, had for a long time, but
they're trying to commercialize it and, um, or consumerize it.
Um, I think it would go against, against who they are as a product
to start penalizing the thing that they're really good at.
Um, but yeah, they have said that like if it's, if.
If they detect a lot of ai, um, content in a piece, but it actually is really
good content still, then it's gonna be elevated just like any other content.
Sure.
Which I think is the right answer.
Mm-hmm.
, there's a lot of paranoia about that.
Um, there's no evidence.
That it would penalize you if you are producing genu genuinely useful content,
which is relevant and everything.
Mm-hmm.
, but I have that paranoia as well that um, I think for example,
chat, G p T always concludes with the word overall or something.
It always says the same word and I always remove that in case
Google makes, uses that as a clue.
Mm-hmm.
. But there is no real evidence.
It just feels like you might get penalized.
It feels like cheating doesn't.
Yeah, well, it does, but you can also ask that G p t to, to write
in the tone of voice of a human.
Mm-hmm.
. So, you know, if you, if you, that's why we have tone of voices and we're, and one,
one of the things that I use it for as well, particularly my own plugin, because
obviously I've got instant access to it in millions of words, is translation.
You know, I, I can say, Here's this paragraph, write this in French, or write
it in German or write it in Hungarian.
That's nice.
Yeah.
And, and it, it does it, so it's, you know, it's pretty
useful for that kind of stuff.
So it's, it's multi, multi-language universal and, um, is a solution,
uh, is a global solution basically.
And even Japanese, you know, it will open ai.
Is, is.
For languages as well.
So it helps translation people, helps, um, uh, understanding, uh,
cultural understanding as well.
You know, say say, I wanna write a letter to my girlfriend who's Polish,
but I wanna write it in Polish.
Track it into.
A rephrase, say, write this in Polish, please.
You know?
Yeah, yeah.
And then get in Polish as
well.
Yeah.
Regarding, uh, universities, um, I mean, that's a little bit of my example.
It wasn't it my, my, um, my daughter's high school essentially, but not
universities, but like, they have had plagiarism detectors for a
really long time, uh, at Univers.
I, I, I used to teach.
Um, and, um, Plagiarism detectors have been around for forever, and
they're gonna continue to be that way.
But, uh, one thing I've heard more and more common from, from teachers
is that they won't be assigning essays, um, to, to write, uh, outside
of the classroom, uh, much anymore.
Great idea.
You wanna do, uh, an essay, it's gonna be 30 minutes at your.
in the classroom.
Um, and, uh, and that's it, you know, uh, no screens, no, no, uh, mobile phones.
I ha I I did install Microsoft Bing on my phone, uh, because I got access
to the, to the Bing AI bot, and I tried it out just this morning.
Um, and it's really cool just having a little AI bot on my phone.
Um, but, um, if I've taken a test, not so much
so, but when I was at school, we didn't, I mean, we all our, we didn't do this
kind of, um, You know, the, the, you get assessed now, there's part that's
like 60% or 70% of your, your SATs or whatever it may be, or your exams.
We didn't do that.
We, we sat down, you know, I'm, I'm old, so when I was at school
we did sit down for an hour and write an essay on such and such.
Yeah.
And that was it.
Yeah.
And that's what you got marked on.
So maybe we are going back to the old school way of doing stuff cause of that.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
Um, cool, cool.
So next and last segment is, um, what is your best advice for new plug-in
shop owners who are considering, uh, AI in one form or another?
Um, Andrew.
Um, , train it on your documentation for a start.
Write good docs and then train it on documentation that will save
you a lot of time in support, um, to get rid of the what, what some
people regard as stupid questions.
I don't think there's ever a stupid question in, in WordPress, but, you know,
so to get rid of the, the, the low level questions, let's low hanging, low level,
low hanging fruit, get rid of it for that.
Um, use it for writing.
Better content to better describe your plugin solution.
Um, and also use it for maybe evaluating your plugin code as well.
You know, certainly with open AI codex, you can throw it into there and say,
you know, what mistakes have I made?
Or Can you reexamine this code?
And it'll, it'll tell you where maybe you've, um, Left an open bracket or
closed bracket or whatever, you know, it'll just, or your syntax isn't quite
correct or you've got a loop wrong.
You know, specifically in Woo Commerce.
You know, Katie knows if you get a Woo commerce loop wrong, it's like a
nightmare to fix it and find it, you know?
So you use it to your best advantage and, and.
Have no guilt about using it.
You know, just use it as another tool.
Use it as we all use tools, um, and, uh, AI is a great tool to help you improve
your business and your productivity.
Excellent,
Katie.
Um, my advice is to be positive and embrace it as a genuine opportunity
to make your business more successful.
Uh, think creatively about the different ways, cuz there are really
a wealth of different opportunities, um, that you probably haven't
thought of that you can incorporate into your processes and possibly
even your future products as well.
Um, but don't.
as a sticking plaster for bad work.
Don't use it to be lazy.
Mm-hmm.
, it's only a tool, it's only a starting point.
Mm-hmm.
, you still need to, uh, finish it off.
Put your own unique knowledge about your product into it,
and don't rely on it too much.
It's all about getting the right balance.
Excellent.
Really good advice.
Um, I think my best advice, um, is to dig into the APIs because there's a lot
of power in there from what I can see.
And I do think a lot of the opportunity is being able to leverage them if
at all possible in your products.
Um, I don't wanna call it a gold rush, but like, essentially if your
product has a good solid use case, not like, Tertiary, like this is just a
marketing employee kind of use case.
Uh, if your product has a good use case for AI to be leveraged in the
product itself, jump into the APIs, get familiar with it, see what you
can do immediately, because there is a lot of opportunity at the moment.
Um, and if you get, get ahead of the game right now, um, then you might
be beating out some bigger players.
Uh, honestly, um, cuz uh, it's harder to implement.
Features like this in, in, uh, in the bigger products.
Um, uh, there's, uh, you, you can be scrappy right now and
get ahead of the game, so sure.
Cool.
Well that wraps us up for today.
This was a great conversation.
Um, went in lots of really interesting dir directions.
Um, Katie, do we have things lined up?
We we're actually a little bit behind still.
Do we have somebody for next week?
We do, don't we?
We do.
We have, and this is one of my favorite topics, marketing, and we have Alex.
Denning from Ellipsis, who's one of the, that's right top people in marketing.
And also because he works with so many product businesses to do
their marketing, he has some really great insights as well as being a
very thoughtful, strategic person.
So he's very, um, definitely someone to, um, listen to next week.
Absolutely.
Uh, I love Alex.
He's a great guy.
I'm looking forward to that for sure.
So Andrew, thanks so much for being here, everybody.
Thank you.
Do that fun YouTube stuff where you like hit the like button and the
subscribe button and all that stuff and uh, we'll see you all next week.
Thanks so much.
Bye.
Thanks.
Appreciate it.
Bye.
Care.