We Discuss ChatGPT & WordPress, The Future?

ChatGPT and the OpenAI company behind this technology have become the hottest properties in Silicon Valley, with companies like Microsoft investing over $50 million plus into OpenAI. So how is this technology going to affect WordPress in the next couple of years?

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Episode Transcript

[00:00:00.250] – Introduction

Welcome to the WP-Tonic this week in WordPress and SAS podcast, where Jonathan Denwood interviews the leading experts in WordPress eLearning and online marketing to help WordPress professionals launch their own SAS.

[00:00:14.630] – Jonathan Denwood

Welcome back, folks, to the WP-Tonic. This week in WordPress and SAS. You’ve just got me and my cohost, Kirk. We did have a guest, but unfortunately, they had a personal emergency. Hopefully, they will be rebooking and coming back, but in this episode, we’re going to be talking about Chat GPT, how it’s going to affect digital marketing, WordPress, and how you do business in the next couple of years. I think both of us got some faults, and I definitely have. So I’m going to let Kirk introduce himself. So, Kirk, would you like to introduce yourself to the listeners and viewers?

[00:01:03.250] – Kurt von Ahnen

Yeah, I’d love to. My name is Kurt von Ahnen. I own a small agency called Manana Nomas Which means we get everything done on time and under budget, and I’ve been working in the WordPress area since about 2004 and am just thrilled to be here with you, Jonathan. We have a lot of fun sometimes.

 

[00:01:22.010] – Jonathan Denwood

Kirk’s very patient with my madness, but there we go. So before we go into the main part of the show, I’ve got a couple of messages from our major sponsors, and we will be back in a few moments.

 

[00:01:36.500] – Speaker 4

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[00:02:09.770] – Speaker 1

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[00:02:41.010] – Jonathan Denwood

We’re coming back. I’m rested. I’ve had a good Christmas for the day. I didn’t do as much as I wanted to do last week, but I still had a break. I feel a little bit reenergized for having a little break, so I just want to point out also we’ve got some great special offers from our sponsors, plus we’ve got a greater list of the best plugins and services. If you’re looking to build something on WordPress to get all these goodies and advice that will save you a ton of time, you just need to go over to WP-Tonic Stroke Deals and WP Tonicdeals, and you get that all there. So let’s go into it. Chat GPT. I’ve got some views about it, but I’ll be interested to hear what your overall opinion of it is. And, you know, it’s been in the news consistently for the last three, six months. Have those views changed? So open to you.

 

[00:04:01.950] – Kurt von Ahnen

Have the views changed? That’s the big question. Jonathan, I’m a convert because I put it off as long as humanly possible. I wanted nothing to do with AI, and I think it’s a human pride thing because I consider myself a writer and a content developer. So I was like, no, I’m going to write my own stuff. I don’t need some fake voice. But then I tried a couple of AI tools, and when I landed on Chat GPT, I was actually kind of shocked at how well it worked.

 

[00:04:32.230] – Jonathan Denwood

So is that pretty neat, then?

 

[00:04:36.790] – Kurt von Ahnen

Well, no, we’ve got some experience with Bertha AI on some of the WordPress platforms that we build, you and I. Jonathan and I’ve played around with Bertha a little bit, and I want to make sure I can be of service to customers and clients and all that and be familiar with tools. But I still felt like I wanted to write my own content. And then when Chat GPT was getting all that press, I said, man, I got to try something. And so I put in a question. I was going to write a blog post, and I thought, well, what are some reasons that people fail at online courses? Like, what could I add value to people with? And so, I just put in the question, why do some people fail online courses? Dude, it’s within like three to 5 seconds. It spits out paragraph bullets and then extended a paragraph for each of the bullets. And when I reviewed the content, I’m not lying, it was like I wrote it. Like, I was looking at it and I was going, that’s exactly what I would have wrote. And so I added a paragraph here and there, I put some personal flares on it, I added a couple of pictures, and next thing you know, I got a blog post.

 

[00:05:46.100] – Kurt von Ahnen

Now, that blog post took me eight to ten minutes, when normally I’d spend an hour or an hour and 15 minutes writing that kind of content. So I can definitely see the draw. I can see why people would be interested in it. And then I’ve learned if I combine Chat GPT with another tool that I’ve relied on in the past, it becomes like this just powerhouse of content, ideas and fulfillment.

 

[00:06:12.390] – Jonathan Denwood

What’s the sound of tool?

 

[00:06:14.470] – Kurt von Ahnen

It’s been around forever. A lot of folks use it called Answer the Public. It’s a website. And so when you go to Answer the Public, I think it’s a.com when you go to Answer the Public, you can put in any subject. Like so you can put in hosting elearning courses, ford, Chevy, motorcycles, whatever, and it in real time will kind of aggregate a graphic that is, what are people asking about that subject in real time. And so you’ll see like a percentage of so many people are asking about how is it made, so many people are asking about how is it sold, but you get like hundreds of questions about that subject matter. And then if you just look at the top section of the most frequently asked questions, if you take one of those questions and then put that in the Chat GPT, you know that your content is basically hitting the sweet spot for that subject matter, for what people are actively searching for at that moment.

 

[00:07:15.530] – Jonathan Denwood

Yeah, thanks for that. I think one of the interesting bits for me, Kirk, about this whole thing was that the company behind these technologies, which is Open AI, it’s how I wrote a few months before Christmas, I wrote a piece about Open AI, which is a nonprofit company. It’s a commercial business, but it’s a nonprofit. And what intrigued me at the time was the amount of money that Microsoft had invested in the business. They were one of the largest there are allergy investors VCs, all the large corporate investors, but one of the largest individual contributors has been Microsoft. And I was a little puzzled why they were investing so much money in it, but I thought, well, they know what they’re doing, blah, blah, blah. But I was a little bit it just didn’t register to me. Now I think it’s become much clearer why they invested in this company. And basically it’s payback time for Google, to put it simply. Obviously Microsoft’s attempts in the search engine have not been that successful. Google basically dominates search, this technology chat GPT, you can there’s been quite a few commentators and influences on YouTube making content that basically you put a question and you’ll get a better result a lot of the time than Google.

 

[00:09:22.470] – Jonathan Denwood

And that is partly down to the quality of search from Google being reduced ever increasing amount of paid adverts, positioning new ways of showing answer to a question than the classical way of listing external pages using artificial intelligence to supply a clip of information, which a lot the time, isn’t that sometimes it works. Well, sometimes it doesn’t. So the in my opinion, the quality of Google search has deteriorated quite a bit over the last 18 months. So I see this really is Microsoft really attempting to get market position? What do you think of what I’m just outlining? Do you think I’m on the right track or do you think I’ve got that wrong?

 

[00:10:27.450] – Kurt von Ahnen

I think there’s somewhat of that track and I have to agree with you on Google search, there’s the amount of censorship and almost seemingly misdirection and things that don’t even seem related to political matters. It’s like I’ll look something up on Google and I don’t find what I want, I open up a separate browser.

 

[00:10:48.350] – Jonathan Denwood

I just mean general search and then you’re trying to find something to help yeah.

 

[00:10:54.100] – Kurt von Ahnen

So you’re looking for something and you don’t see it, and then you open up another browser and there it is. And I don’t know the rhyme or reason to why that’s like that lately, but I would agree that the Google search has declined. The other thing that I wondered was what’s the revenue pattern for this? Because everything I’ve done in Chat GPT so far has been free. Everyone else I talked to is free. So what’s the revenue model?

 

[00:11:24.760] – Jonathan Denwood

Well, then they already publicly stated that they will be charging for the technology, but it will be a fraction of a cent. You get that with already assisted writing apps like Birth and Javelin and there’s a number of them out there now. How will this affect the world of WordPress? Well, one of the direct ways that I can see it affecting is creation and being able, as we’ve had a few guests on the show recently, and one of the topics that regglee has come out is how WordPress has enormous strengths, but one of its weaknesses, it is a glorified flea market. Obviously, trying to make that situation easier for users is fraught with financial and political problems because by giving a curated list or removing others, they’re not going to be very welcome in, obviously for very understandable business reasons about them being excluded from something so automatic. WordPress.org have on purpose really been extremely resistant. Apart from letting the popularity of a particular theme and plugging be the only dominator that would put you on top of the list because you’re obviously going to wordpress.org and you’re doing a search there for your plugin or theme to come up at the top has been extremely important.

 

[00:13:34.150] – Jonathan Denwood

But we found that people have been utilizing various techniques to manipulate the basic functionality there. And also, I think, slightly, its importance, which was extremely important a couple of years ago, has been in decline as well. What’s your thoughts about that?

 

[00:13:58.590] – Kurt von Ahnen

The flea market aspect with the what is it, 60,000 plus plugins that are available for WordPress or something like that? It’s a crazy number, right? Huge, yeah. The when I found out that you could use Chat GPT to write a WordPress plug in via AI, I thought, well, that’s going to be messy code, like, no one’s auditing it, right? They could just be gluing stuff together and then you’re going to have every.

 

[00:14:24.870] – Jonathan Denwood

Time they tell me that any.

 

[00:14:28.710] – Kurt von Ahnen

But then you’ll have every Tom, Dick and Harry out there. I’m not a developer, fair enough, but now an implementer goes to Chat GPT and says, hey, Chat GPT, make me a plug in that does X, Y and Z, god forbid it works. Then they go, oh, that’s awesome, I’m going to submit it or I’m going to promote it or I’m going to whatever, and I’m afraid it’s going to bloat the market with a bunch of half working nonsensical stuff that people are going to have to wade through to find stuff they really want or is effective.

 

[00:14:58.270] – Jonathan Denwood

Well, I think that’s the position is after time. But no, I do honestly think Coracian utilizing this technology to help assist people in finding the right set up for their particular needs from input they give in a method that’s affordable. I think we’re going to see more and more crat services that have this. I think the other thing about this technology is it’s overplayed to some extent because it’s not alive, it’s definitely not intelligent. It’s used in the native ability of code and computers and speed to the impression. It’s a little bit of a con in some ways, but because it works and it works more effectively, this particular form of technology I think the other factor that has been taught is that when you take some of the content that it provides and you put it into a copyright checker, it normally doesn’t come back flagged as being directly scraped. It is scraping. It’s just more sophisticated scraping. It my understanding. But there is a fair bit of confusion around this, that it is scraping to some, but it’s a more sophisticated form of scraping and it uses the technology to combine different sources and it has parameters so it won’t trigger that.

 

[00:17:18.670] – Jonathan Denwood

It doesn’t flag up copy infringement, but it is scraping. And I think it’s one of the drawbacks because as this technology is utilized, more and more and more of it will be to produce from an ever smaller original group of articles and pieces that were written from real people. So I think this whole where it’s scraping, where it got original material and then it adapted it, I think there’s going to be a lot of pushback about people saying, well, it’s obvious they’re going to use other AI technology to be able to say, well, you’ve done this, but we can clearly see that you got it from our original content. So I think there’s going to be a bit of more pushback about where they got this content to write this. Is this making any sense or do you think I’m off?

 

[00:18:24.050] – Kurt von Ahnen

No, it is. And for me, I’m a parent, got kids, I’m involved with kids at church, all that. And from a societal standpoint, it is pretty scary because think about a kid has to write an essay for English class. He just goes into chat GPT, puts in a subject, has an essay and submits it done. And I think back to the days when I was in school and they would said, okay, no calculators in math class because you’re not going to have calculators with you all the time. Right? And then we ended up with calculators, then we ended up with phones. Right. Who needs to know math now? When you got everything in your phone, there’s not much that we can’t search. And it’s like the dumbing down of society. It’s like you look at what Franklin and jefferson and Washington wrote, I know you’re from England. I just named a bunch of Americans. Look at what Churchill wrote.

 

[00:19:18.690] – Jonathan Denwood

Oh, yeah, he was drunk when he was drawing.

 

[00:19:23.970] – Kurt von Ahnen

But you look at the vocabulary and you look at the sentence structure, and you can sense a little bit of intelligence there. And then you look at how we’ve progressed with technology and how that technology, while it’s great to use, has really, I think, weakened the core intelligence of people. It makes us lazy.

 

[00:19:45.850] – Jonathan Denwood

I don’t actually agree with that, but I do understand where you’re coming from. I think it’s a very poplistic view. I think there are some irritating habits. That the reason why I say that just before we go through our break is I don’t know if you’re aware of the Hearst and the Hearst family and you ever gone to Hearst Castle in Northern California?

 

[00:20:17.990] – Kurt von Ahnen

Never went to the castle.

 

[00:20:19.910] – Jonathan Denwood

It’s really fantastic, actually. It’s a national it’s a California national park. And the actual villa it’s a villa kind of straight castle is spectacular, actually. But Hearst, he bought a number of papers and he was involved in a form of journalism called yellow journalism, which was a form of tabloid, the modern day form of tabloid journalism, and some of the things that was extremely controversial, how you utilize it as a propaganda mythology. But some of the things that you were just saying was said in the 1920s and the early 30s about yellow journalism and about tabloid journalism. So those fears and observations, I feel, have been there for quite a while. But you might be right. We’re going to go for our break. We pack it a few moments, folks.

 

[00:21:39.310] – Speaker 5

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[00:22:11.450] – Speaker 6

This podcast episode is brought to you by Lyfter. LMS, the leading learning management system solution for WordPress. If you or your client are creating any kind of online course, training based membership website, or any type of elearning project, lifter LMS is the most secure, stable, well supported solution on the market. Go to lifterlms.com and save 20% at checkout with coupon code podcast 20. That’s podcast 20. Enjoy the rest of your show.

 

[00:22:49.190] – Jonathan Denwood

We’re coming back. Like to point out, if you’re a WordPress power user, a dever, a graphic designer, and you’re looking for a great WordPress hosting provider, look at WP Tonic, especially if you’re building a website for a membership. A client that wants to build a membership, of course, wants to be an elearning entrepreneur. We provide fantastic hosting, but much, much more. We provide a library of top notch plugins that are the best of Breed to help you build that for your client. Plus as a WordPress, as a WP partner, you’ll get 40% of the initial purchase from your client plus you will earn 20% year after year. So it is a tremendous partnership and a tremendous financial partnership. If that sounds interesting, go over to WP Tonicpartners, repeat that WP Tonicpartners and you can sign up to become a WP partner. Me or Kirk will have a chat with you and we would love you to come on board and work with WP Tonic. So back into what we’ve been talking about chat GPT like I said, I see creation being one of the main factors it affects WordPress. Also the graphics side. One of the ways you see this on appsuma is there’s a number of SEO hybrid products on appsuma.

 

[00:24:40.730] – Jonathan Denwood

Also being on the general market that look at your content, advise you, advise you how to improve titles, improve word densercy of key phrases in either helping you write new content but give you outline of a document, help you with certain paragraphs and then basically they’re mimicking the same technology that Google has been using for the past two to three years. It’s another frequent, helps you produce better. Also there’s a number of copy assistants very like Jarvis and aimed at I’ve bought a couple of them that help with long form content but I do really see them as assistance. I see them as AIDS to help you produce content quicker but also help you improve content. I’m also very excited about how we bought into Burfer early. I understand we had Adam Presley on that. Adam is going to be entering this market as well. I think he said he mentioned it, didn’t it? I think it’s going to be called Shore Writer. He will be in the near future than that. But I’m quite excited about how this is going to help course people building membership, education courses, helping them write more effective content because I think this is one of the main and it kind of also goes into the general area a lot.

 

[00:26:40.930] – Jonathan Denwood

If you ever worked for clients, it’s one of the main hurdles, having blank pages or pages and having to write content. It should help or do you think I’m just being optimistic there, it’s not really going to help.

 

[00:26:59.350] – Kurt von Ahnen

Customers and content. That seems to be a contention. Jonathan, I don’t know if anything is going to fix that. I don’t know what it is about that everyone has a great idea but nobody can write it down on a piece of paper and hand it to you to put on a website. It’ll be interesting. And I wonder if these AI tools will become so ubiquitous and so easy to use like people using a smartphone. I wonder if it will become so easy that people will begin to use it and implement it right or if it’s always going to be that extra step that the average person doesn’t do. We’re kind of like in the tech world, we think things are exciting and we go and check this stuff out. But on a percentage basis of population, I’d really be curious to see how many people have really tried it and tried to really do something cool with it. You know what I mean?

 

[00:27:54.550] – Jonathan Denwood

Well, one of the problems is even with something like birth and I know it depends on they would deny this and I’m just not framing this around Bertha. I think it’s any of these tools. Jarvis any of them. You have to learn how to work with them. There’s a knack to it. You can’t just straight go in and think you’re going to get fantastic results. You’re going to have to do a little bit of a dive and read some help documentation or videos about how it works and try it out and practice a little bit with any of these writing assistance platforms, apps as I call them, because you’re going to be a bit disappointed. I’ve already spoken to a few people that just dived in and they just gave up on it straight away and they said, well, I could write this quicker than utilize this. So it does really depend on so what I’m saying is don’t lose patience as quickly. If you’re a really good writer, it’s just going to help you maybe produce more content, but it’s not going to replace you. Those that find it hard, it should be a mechanism that helps you get over that hump.

 

[00:29:32.010] – Jonathan Denwood

But I’m not even sure about that because you are going to have to study the platform that you’re going to be utilizing. It’s like anything, isn’t it? Some people say, well, shopify is so much easier than WooCommerce. Well, I do actually agree with that because you are going to have to jump through a few extra loops, but you get all the benefits of ownership and flexibility, blah, blah, blah. But on our land, like something like shopify or in the membership area. Kajabi when people say, oh, it’s much so much easier than WordPress, it really depends where you’re coming from. It really depends on what your personal experience is. There’s a lot more to that statement. It’s a lot more faceted than what a lot of people make out. And I really see the same with these writing tools. I also think we’re on the early date and I know Chris from Lifter LMS has his own personal marketing to utilize these and it’s really cool, but obviously at some stage it’s going to be overdone. But I think we are in the very early days of I really think you can clearly see it is going to disrupt the writing sector.

 

[00:31:10.480] – Jonathan Denwood

But also I really think it’s going to really disrupt to some extent the graphics side as well. Do you think I’m right about that?

 

[00:31:20.730] – Kurt von Ahnen

I think you are correct about the graphics and kind of disrupting that space. And I hate to say it out loud, but possibly devaluing what? Someone’s willing to pay for graphics. Because people think all of a sudden, you can go to the brand crowd and have a logo done for 35, $50, whatever it is. Or you can hire a graphic designer and people begin to misunderstand or convince themselves that the cheap way is the way for them and then they pay the price in quality. And I’m just wondering how good this AI is going to be able to move and manipulate people’s needs and possibly replace or devalue the real world.

[00:32:07.350] – Jonathan Denwood

Yeah, I can see exactly where you’re coming from. The only thing I would say about it, I think it’s been devalued already by services like 99 Designs and the one you mentioned. I think they devalued a certain type of clientele, but they were always extremely difficult to deal with anyway. Because when you ever even put the price of I’m not super expensive, but a reasonable price to get a reasonably experienced graphic design and help them do a logo, they would bulk at it anyway. They would get their nephew or their brother to knock something out, and it tended to be horrendous, but that was always there anyway. Depending on a budget of the client, to some extent, it may go the other way.

 

[00:33:02.510] – Kurt von Ahnen

It may become the best filter in the world to get rid of deadbeats and clients that you don’t want. It might be the greatest filter in the world to bring premium clients to people that are really skilled.

 

[00:33:13.710] – Jonathan Denwood

I think in some ways you touched on, I don’t really think it will affect the really cheap side or the really upper side. I think it’s the middle market in web development and in design that it’s probably going to affect a bit more in some way. The elephant is I’ve got the services, there’s like two to three services that you put in the parameters of the website, and they build the whole website for you using chat GPT. And that’s when I was getting back to the curation because I see these creation mechanisms. We’re in the early stages, and I haven’t tried any of these. Supposedly, AI-supported, you put in some parameters, and it flew out. But it’s not that through blocks which is Gutenberg, more and more websites are going to go to be a mixture of different blocks effectively. I predeveloped this with one of our friends on the show that I have a regular podcast with Spencer forum; it’s one of his key pointers. More and more, it’s utilizing existing laid-out Lego bricks but knowing the best Legos and how to put them together. And I do agree with him. I think you can see that with Gutenberg blocks AI can be part of choosing the right blocks to put into a more quasar customizable solution for a particular client.

 

[00:35:15.870] – Jonathan Denwood

Can you see where I’m going with this? Do you think I might be on the right track?

 

[00:35:19.750] – Kurt von Ahnen

I do, yeah. I think the options are going to be limitless. Honestly, when you listen to Jordan Peterson and some other really celebrated people online talk about this chat GPT and AI, they forecast something a year or two down the road that is something that my brain can’t even wrap around right now.

 

[00:35:40.650] – Jonathan Denwood

It’s probably for the best that you.

 

[00:35:42.050] – Kurt von Ahnen

Don’t, actually, but it’s like, it’s going to do this, it’s going to do that, it’s going to do and then.

 

[00:35:47.580] – Jonathan Denwood

You want to every day I think we get closer to the terminator. There we go. I think we better wrap up the show now. So, Kirk, what is the best way for people to find out more about you, your faults, and your company?

 

[00:36:04.820] – Kurt von Ahnen

Kirk, well, Manana Nomasis my company name, so if you go to Manjanomas.com, you’ll be able to find me, and anything you search for Manjana Nomas online is typically me. It’s all over, and then I’m a big person on LinkedIn. If you want to go and find me on LinkedIn, that’s the easiest way to get a hold of me. Message me, and we’ll set up a meet and greet; we’ll do a break-the-ice call, and we’ll see how we can add value to each other. I’d love to meet you.

 

[00:36:28.480] – Jonathan Denwood

Yeah. And, folks, do remember to go to the WP Tonicpartners. Look at our Pacific hosting partnership plans. You get a great commission, and you get access to WP-Tonic as your partner to build membership learning management systems for your clientele. It’s a great platform and a great partnership that goes over there. We’ll be back next week with hopefully a great guest. We got some great guests booked up in January and in February. Plus, at the end of each month, we’re going to be doing the WP-Tonic Roundtable Show. We’ll be coming back, but it’s going to be a monthly show on the last Thursday of every month. I got a great panel that’s agreed to be with us, Kirk and me. Kirk will be the host of that particular show, and then the first one is at the end of this month. We’ll give you more details next week. We’ll see you soon, folks. Bye.

 

[00:37:32.390] – Ending

Hey, thanks for listening. We really do appreciate it. Why not visit the Mastermind Facebook group? And also, to keep up with the latest news, click the WP Tonic.com newsletter. We’ll see you next time.

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