Episode 28: How Kadence AI Will Change the Way We Build with WordPress

It is impossible to be anywhere in tech news and not hear about artificial intelligence and how ChatGPT has changed the world as we know it. In this episode, Shane Pearlman from Modern Tribe joins Kadence Founder Ben Ritner and Kadence Marketing lead Kathy Zant for a discussion about AI and the emerging world of AI in WordPress development. Modern Tribe has been leading an initiative with Kadence to bring website development to an entirely new level where custom sites are built rapidly based on modern WordPress development standards and the power of OpenAI.

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Timestamps and Links

• 0:00 Introduction
• 1:59 Using AI for headshots and the innovations happening in image generation
• 4:40 Using AI for trip planning
• 6:44 Using Copilot for code and prototyping applications
• 13:12 The genesis of AI with large language models
• 17:23 Will AI replace coders or any of our jobs?
• 20:29 Will AI replace WordPress site developers?
• 22:50 AI will force us to diversify our skillsets
• 23:59 Using ChatGPT for content, should you and how?
• 26:18 WooCommerce and AI
• 31:48 Accessing deeper data pools for AI content
• 33:00 Kadence AI: What’s coming to WordPress
• 42:00 Sign up for the Kadence AI Beta Waitlist
• 46:00 How to get started using AI in your business processes

ChatGPT Transcript Summary

As promised to Shane, here’s the ChatGPT summarization of this episode’s transcript. Find this helpful? Let us know in the comments!

The transcript is a conversation between Kathy, Ben, and Shane Pearlman about AI and its impact on different aspects of life. They discuss how AI can generate headshots, improve marketing strategies, and assist in trip planning. They also talk about how AI can generate code snippets, and while it may not be able to write complex code, it can save time and be useful for prototyping and one-off add-ons. They also talk about how Kadence AI will change the way WordPress users will create websites, with a yoga studio used as a prototype example. They mention that AI can be a powerful tool for freelancers and that it has the potential to change the way we approach problem-solving.

The AI Headshot Experiment

An AI headshot generator gone wild with about 15 pictures of Kathy. Hit or miss, but it definitely makes you wonder.

Transcript

Kathy: Welcome to a very special edition of the Kadence Beat. I am here with Ben, of course, because Ben is always here. But we have a very special guest here today, Shane Pearlman. I’m just gonna pitch it over to you and why don’t you tell us a little bit about who you are, how you’re involved with everyone here over at StellarWP and of course Kadence, too.

Shane: Hi everybody. My name is Shane Pearlman. I live out in the Canary Islands, which is a little set islands off Western Africa. And I’ve been in the WordPress space a pretty long time. I’m one of the founders of Modern Tribe, as well as The Events Calendar and a number of other products.

Today I’m part of the Liquid Web/Stellar leadership team. And Modern Tribe plays a really interesting role in that group, in that we’re the glue between brands. So we create lots of internal solutions, accelerated solutions for all of our different brands. And in particular, about nine months ago, almost a year ago, we started working on some AI prototypes to make creating a website, creating a shop, much, much easier. And those are getting really close to beta. Ben, when do we get our beta? So we’re gonna talk about that and the world of AI. I hope you’re coming to Word Camp Europe if you’re in the neighborhood.

Greece is pretty darn great, although it’s hot in summer. I’m gonna be moderating and leading a panel on the practical use of AI in day-to-day usage for WordPress developers, product owners, marketers. So this isn’t a big think. This is a what can I actually do and how to get value.

So this is a good place for me to practice.

Ben: Yeah, this is perfect. Starting out then, one of the questions I wanted to know from really each one of us is what is a way that AI has impacted you recently where you’ve been like, wow, this is a really cool tool. You started using it, or you’re like, it was like the aha moment of oh man, this is gonna change things.

Shane: Wanna go first, Kathy? So much pressure.

Kathy: My, my funny story is somebody posted in a group that I was in that they had used this AI headshot generator, and my headshots are like, Five, six years old, back when I lived in Mount Shasta, and they’re really old, right? And so am I. I’m getting older.

And so I was like, all right, I’ll give this a go. So you load up like 10-15 of your photos, of you doing pretty much anything and it spits out a hundred pictures of you. That just is very unsettling cuz it’s not you. It’s not me. And then in one of them it gave me an extra hand and in other ones I look like, ooh, like Samantha from Bewitched.

And I look like Cheryl, who’s selling split levels in Naperville, Illinois. And then also I’m considering maybe a country music career because all of these new opportunities for this avatar of…. this person that looks like me just opened up with all of this. So that was like a really weird example of how AI just…

Shane: That whole tech is about to get like crazy interesting. Cuz I was talking to the R&D crew at Automattic about some of their projects, and this is one I’m allowed to talk about. They were saying one of the things we’ve actively been working on… Is that the average person just takes bad photos, let’s just acknowledge it. We’re just not good at lighting and positioning, even though the iPhone or whatever has done a lot of good job, they’re like, we’re doing it.

They’re like, what we’re trying to do is make it so that you can take your sorta imperfect product shot, feed it, and it’ll return to a beautiful version of exactly the same thing. So it’s like scrub up. And it’s not just filters, it’s having AI regenerate, but be like, oh, I know what you want here, let me give you the same thing. But lit, positioned from the right angle with the right that’d be amazing. Amazing if I could just upload all my photos and have it be like, magic. And now you know my shoe looks epic and my kid looks happy instead of grumpy and whatever.

Kathy: It’s crazy. It’s really crazy. I will put a few of the photos that this AI tool generated for me in the show notes. So you definitely have to head over to the Kadence podcast show notes and take a look at them. But I think also it can be very helpful for a marketing person, because this is like my personal brand.

It’s me how I think about myself. If you are uploading your product pictures and you see them in a different light, how does it change how you think about and how you position your brand, how you position your products? It can really up level and bring in some perspective that maybe you didn’t have when you first started with your brand.

So I’m really excited what it does for the world of marketing. But how about you, Shane? Have you had a crazy experience?

Shane: Crazy? It was really interesting. So my daughter’s 14 and we’re all going to work Camp Europe, going to Greece and she like is just a crazy. Percy Jackson fan and all the old stuff that I just don’t care about, but it’s awesome.

And so she was like we’re gonna go see all this old stuff. And I was like, fine, you plan this trip because I just won’t go to the beach. And so she was like, okay, I will then. And was like, dad, can I have your ChatGPT login? And I was like why? And then I looked at the history and she, and ChatGPT planned our trip around Greece.

She was like, and it was great. She. Hey, ChatGPT could you give me a thing that balances my desire to see old stuffs and my brother’s short attention span and the fact that he doesn’t care about old rocks and that I don’t wanna spend more than two and a half to three hours a day at a car.

Every other day, and I wanna sleep at least two nights in any place like she was. And then ChatGPT was like, oh, here’s three different itineraries depending on which part of Greece you wanna go. And she’s oh, I like that one. That looks cool. Okay, cool. Now refine it here. Hey, where should I sleep?

Can you gimme some good, a hotel recommendation like, It was like a personal travel planner and they just tore through the whole thing. Wow. Booked it. It was really great. I will say there’s a warning, they talk about hallucinations or maybe the more polite versions confabulations. But there were some moments where ChatGPT was like, Hey, check out this hotel.

And I was like, that hotel doesn’t exist. She’s like, I can’t find it dad. And I’m like, yeah, there’s no such hotel. I dunno what it’s talking about. So just to wrap it up, the part to me that was like, whoa. Was then I was like, cool, so where do we need to go? And she’s like ChatGPT, could you make a Google map driving itinerary for my dad with each stop and location and things I wanna see and spread it over days. And it was like, here’s a url. And there we go. I had my whole trip with driving instructions. It was beautiful. Wow, that’s wild. But that was pretty awesome. There you go. Wow.

Kathy: Yes. That’s really cool.

How about you, Ben?

Ben: Yeah. I don’t have anything crazy for sure, but I think probably the thing that was like the most surprising to me was with Copilot I needed I needed a snippet of code of PHP that was gonna allow me to search for a chunk of a string recursively. So I needed to pull a chunk of a string out of the middle of a large string, but I needed to do it recursively.

And so typical for me is I would just like hop on Google and let’s get started. Let me see some examples of what other people have done. And then I went to write the function name in after I had found what I’d wanted and Copilot read out the function that I was looking at on my other screen without and I was all of a sudden wow, this whole search is not even needed.

And the fact that it knew because of the context of the code, even on Stackoverflow, it wasn’t like it, it wasn’t like I picked the first one, right? It was like I needed to go through and be like, no, that’s not exactly what I’m looking for. That whole search went away when I just started writing the function name and it spit out the chunk of code and it was basically a copy from what I was looking at, which I was like, this is really interesting and it’s gonna change the way that I think about when I’m going to look for little snippets like this.

Do I need to even get on Google anymore and should I just start writing the function name and seeing what it kicks out?

Shane: Can I ask like a, I guess I have to admit at this point I’m technically a non-developer. I’m just too far away from it, even though I had a decade of developing WordPress That day is over, but ChatGPT stopped collecting content in September of 2021, and so if it’s given you snippets, Is it missing like 18 months of like code knowledge and best practice standards and versions of PHP?

Like I, I hadn’t seen what it’s producing. Is it producing stuff that you’re like, feel is modern good, or is it like, has this weird gap in it when it writes stuff?

Ben: Unfortunately in WordPress we’re never writing cutting edge PHP because we’re having support. So it wouldn’t really matter if there’s a year and a half of new stuff missing.

I’m not using that year and a half of new PHP because no, like it’s not what’s supported. So we’re always a little bit behind in the WordPress community in terms of what’s the latest in php, but in terms of what it writes in terms of snippets that I’m not asking it to write a really intense.

Piece of code. It’s more of give me a function versus let’s figure out, it’ll be a plugin. Yeah. Like some of the complexities of different files and how they’re gonna interact and all of that. Yeah I haven’t been like, oh my gosh, this thing can write code for me. It’s more of this thing can save me some time writing code.

Shane: I’ll counter, we know. Within Liquid Web outside, I know people who are using ChatGPT to or OpenAI and any of the number to write WordPress plugins and not just not just marketing stunts. Cuz as a tangible example Jack over at LearnDash was planning to write an integration with OpenAI to create outlines for course content to help content creators. And he was like, I wonder if ChatGPT could write to that plugin itself. And he did it. And he’s I was like, I asked him, I was like, how long did it take you? He’s eh, about two hours of like little tweaking and learning.

He said, mostly because I had to reteach it, the database structure. Because the database structure changed in the last 18 months, and so it was working off an old structure and we had to get it up to date. But he is now I’ve got that stuff in the pocket. I don’t have to do that work again.

Now I’ve got what I need to create that prompt. And that prompt created a plugin that they beta tested for a couple weeks and was good enough that they went back to the team the other day and said, yeah. Clean this up, get it real tight, merge it into core. This is good to go, man. And so from a prototyping tool, it was incredible.

You could easily spend 15 hours, 20 hours trying to write something like that, but it was good enough to vet an idea.

Ben: Yep. Yeah, I think that’s probably what I would say is the code that it writes is good enough to vet an idea or like a lot of stuff. But when it comes to adding to existing code bases, complex things we’re, I still think we’re far away off.

Shane: You have a high standard, picky, and like I think there’s a lot of people out there who need to create like what I’ll call patches one-off add-ons. Think of all the people who come with feature requests. Yeah, and like my tendency is to wanna be like, if you’re not worried about a hundred people using this and other case scenarios and it’s just yours and you just need to get it working, you’d be like, ChatGPT, I need an add-on that does this to this plugin that makes it look like this way or makes this data go here. And I think for the average freelancer, this is gonna give them a lot of power in their hands. Yeah, I’m super excited about that.

Ben: It’s a good point. It’s a really good point.

Kathy: I just, I sat through Nathan Ingram for iThemes Training. He did a fixit session yesterday and I sat through because there was a bunch of Kadence questions, mostly Kadence elements, which was really fun. That’s my favorite part of Kadence anyway. But somebody asked, how do I show all of my products in my Woo store but I want to omit one category.

And Nathan fired up ChatGPT and basically asked that question and the function was just spit right out and the problem was solved. I thought it was just amazing. I did a little screenshot of it because I thought it was great. Like this is the perfect place to use AI, instead of searching through the forums or StackOverflow or something like that, just, I just need this one thing to work. And you have your helper ChatGPT solving problems that maybe not be perfectly obvious, especially for people who are just like trying to get something done with WordPress, but not necessarily want to be a coder for the rest of their lives.

So was a neat implementation. I kind of wanna talk a little bit about yeah, we’ve got some instances here of how this is impacting all of us and maybe some thoughts about how it’s influencing some of us in the WordPress space and how it might change development. But what does this mean for the general public? Is this gonna change the way search works? Is this going to change the way blogging works? Can we do a little bit of like future casting of what you’re seeing in terms of how this is changing the way people use the internet?

Shane: What do you think Ben?

Ben:Yeah, that’s great.

Shane: I can riff, you can riff where you wanna go?

Ben: Yeah. I think I think it’s worth just saying for our audience, if you’re not, if you haven’t gotten into ai, if you haven’t tried out Chatbot or any of this stuff and you’re like, what are they really talking about? Shane, can you give us that like quick how we got to this moment of like, all of tech is basically like, How do we…

Shane: And is this gonna be another metaverse or is this like for real? Are we right? Is this a flash in the pan? Are we gonna go? So first off, let’s start. We all know or we don’t know, for those of you who might not know, In the same way about five years ago, Mullenweg showed up and he is y’all, we’re gonna decide that JavaScript is our future.

I need you to go learn JavaScript, embrace it, get a hella good at it. That’s it. He just said the same thing around leveraging AI in every meaningful way we can. And that’s I personally, for about the last year at Liquid Web, have been like, “Hey y’all, I think over the next 24 months, AI is gonna become the differentiator and accelerator for a lot of brands.”

Now, to start with, AI is a weird word, man. It, there’s nothing intelligent about it yet. It is artificial, but what we’re really talking about are these sort of large language models. That’s where we’re at today and where we’re at. Large language models.

You, every single one of us have been leveraging large language models for a while. This is not a new thing. You, every time you got into Google Translate, you are using a large language model. It was a large tool, meant to take huge amounts of data and produce basically like new sets of data that are useful and functional and pragmatic.

That’s what it’s for. And there are all kinds of variations. There’s specialized ones, there’s generalized ones, but a lot of what, at least your science fiction history when they talked about ai. Was the idea that at some point these large language models get so damn good that the difference between what we consider intelligence and what they’re able to do is undecipherable.

We’re not there yet. So right now what we’re talking about whether well open ai, which is what Powers ChatGPT is one of the big ones, there are a number out there. There’s some open source ones. There are private ones and they do different things. Some are focused on the generation of media.

We’ve seen a lot about DALL-E and a number of these that are producing images. We’re about to start seeing video. The 3D models aren’t quite there yet. If you go out and check out and you’re like, gee, I wonder how good it is at producing 3D stuff. And you look at it and you’re like that’s freaking weird.

But in the same way that the 2D images, ones had hands coming outta your face just six months ago, and now they’re winning photo awards and the Screenwriter’s Guild is freaking out because they’re all worried their job is about disappear. It is. And so you’ve got these that are coming up and I think what’s happened when the ChatGPT came out is it was the first time the public audience could just get in there and try things.

And that’s, to me a transformative step. And we’re seeing all kinds of different things and we’ll dive into, for me there’s what I call the obvious stuff. The obvious stuff. What can you do with it? I can go create web content. Very obvious. Yeah. And everybody’s doing it in all kinds of ways.

And it’s super interesting. And even though it’s obvious, you should learn how to leverage it to your benefit. There are challenges. I think one of the big areas we’re gonna continue to see of evolution is translation. Right now we, this is one of the first big places that these big language models from a consumer perspective had a meaningful impact on my life.

But they’re still like, got a way to go. And so we can talk about some of the projects I’m seeing to bridge that gap, to make translations get really engaging. There’s a really cool project coming outta site ground that we were, that I was chatting with them about that I think is phenomenal. So there’s that, and then there’s there’s code assistance, right?

Ben was talking about Copilot. There’s all these tools that are gonna essentially assist you in your tasks. Some of them are around codes, some of them are around content, some of them around design. These are all, honestly, these are all creative content tasks. I think there is a sort of debate is how quickly do these tools get better at our work than we are?

And does that genuinely create risk in the white collar world? Ben, what do you think, Ben? I think, yes, I think 20 years from now our industry of web design and web creation will be a fundamentally different thing.

Ben: I’m not totally sold on that perspective. I, to me it still so acts like a tool and still requires so much pampering that even if it was good 99% of the time, even with these large language models, there’s no solution for testing itself, like against itself.

Shane: Yeah, and so look, I moved from other languages to php, in WordPress and the first thing, cuz I moved from a compiled language and the WordPress and my first reaction coming into PHP is like, where’s the debugger? Where’s the thing that routes all this stuff? Why doesn’t this language check itself what crappy code?

And and it took me a while to get comfortable, but the fact is, the whole WordPress community has basically been working without unit tests and without any kind of way to check itself for a decade and a half until we finally got there.

Ben: Yeah, I just think there’s a difference between asking chatbot to write something for you and then trusting that it’s good and not knowing how to troubleshoot it and not knowing how to optimize it and not understanding it.

I think the, when it comes to code, like we just, we are always going to need coders, like always going to need coders because as much as it can help coders code faster, there’s still so much. stuff involved with code that I think there needs to be humans to help that AI model along. So in my opinion, I don’t know that I’m that concerned that AI is going to make it to where, let’s just talk about Kadence.

Like we don’t need any more devs because we can build this product or whatever. And I obviously That’s assuming that WordPress is still around and all this stuff, which I think is safe to assume. That it long journey ahead of it. Yeah. I think we have a long time until we’re experiencing the web and such a completely different thing that we can’t even fathom what that looks like right now or how we would plan for it.

But I don’t know that, I see this as being all of a sudden companies need half the amount of people that they needed because of. Large language models. I think it just changes some of the dynamics of what we’re working on and how we’re working on it and how quickly we can ship stuff and how quickly companies can move into new areas versus just a flat out we don’t need these people anymore because we have these large language models.

Shane: So I’ll play devil’s advocate on you. Yeah. I think it used to take a dozen specialists to hand build a car. And we got to the point where Henry Ford was able to create a system of automation that produced a perfectly acceptable car that met everybody’s needs. Sure. It wasn’t a custom car, it wasn’t a unique car, it wouldn’t do anything, but it was, it met what 80 or 70% of people needed off the factory line where there’s still people in the factory. Sure. But now you had one person able to produce a thing that originally took a whole team. I think we’re gonna see the same for general web creation. Is there still gonna need for special software that does custom things? Absolutely. Are we gonna still need that understanding?

But are we there today? No. I’m still going to the point where I’m like, Hey, Chad, G p t I did this today. Hey I’m helping a friend do a real estate project. He’s trying to figure out how to build 220 apartments needs a quick site for investors and buyers. What would you put in the content?

Would you do a site outline for me, blah, blah, blah. But, is there a model yet out there that’s a specialized model? That essentially understands 500 niche industries, a thousand niche industries, and what the content nuances are for those. Not yet, but you know what, if there’s enough need for one, then there’s the value in generating one.

Yeah, and we’re, I don’t think we’re that far from a point where Kadence. You know where you get in and you’re like, Hey, Kadence, I need a yoga website. It’s gonna be in Krakau, Poland. Here’s my team, here’s my stuff. Bam, please. And we’re able to ping a large language model, whether it’s open API or something else, and be like, Yoga studio, this person, ethnicity, whatever.

Yeah. By the way here’s 50 articles they wrote in their past. Will you make sure that any content you generate is in that same voice, style and character? And give me the site outline. Please consider the s e o on that. And Kadence can grab all that stuff and be like, and oh, by the way Model that we’ve trained on Gutenberg blocks and Kadence blocks.

We need an about page with this context and this stuff. Could you pick the best blocks and give us like seven versions that we can just display side by side, so somebody be like, woo, pretty, that one. And we can get to, I was around the era where WordPress blew up because of the five minute install.

Yeah. Before man installing, you could get to know servers and you had to know DNS and all this stuff, and sudden you could click a button. I think we’re within months, optimistically a year of the five minute website. Yeah.

Ben: Yeah. I think that for a long time, we’ve been moving in that area of like people who are building just blank websites need to diversify their skillset to understand not only how do I create a website and WordPress and just create these brochure sites over and over again, but how do I actually help this company make money?

So how do I help them market? How do I help them with seo? Like the need to diversify your skillset to understand. The bottom line, which is, how do I make this company money? If they’re gonna hire me to build a website or do anything for them, how do I make them money? And so that means essentially that the skillset that web developers have is gonna change.

I don’t know that means web developers are gonna go away. Because your skillset is gonna be leaning more towards, I’m a better prompt writer than you to open AI or whatever it is. I know how to do some of this communication stuff. I know how to manage this. I know how to work. The next level of your website.

Yeah, you created it in five minutes and that’s great. That’s saved us a bunch of time and money. But what’s the next step for you?

Shane: Are you gonna get customers pipeline conversion, know all to be able to get people to show up at this darn website and engage with you?

Ben: And then to me, even with the SEO thing, like if we talk about that for a second, Google is going to combat the flood of content that is coming in from open ai.

They’re gonna have to, or they’re gonna lose. And so you have the, one of the largest companies in the world recognizing if we don’t figure out a way to distinguish between floods of just content. That’s good. That seem, that’s written from a, a bot versus content that people actually want to read because it’s got story and human interaction and human personality and character that whole piece is going to be there where we’re gonna be, like it was once great to flood your website with content from chatbot, but now you can actually get dinged for that because Google’s seeing this as this isn’t authentic. This isn’t somebody who’s actually engaging with the people that are coming or trying to find their content.

And so even that whole thing, like I think there’s going just the way that they fought against spam, I think there’s going to be that fight against. This quick win of, I can get ranked because I can flood my site with content.

Shane: But I do think these tools like where you’re gonna there’s the creation of your overall content, let’s say whole blog post. That’s one thing. The other is there are huge gaps in the content creation process, which is the boring part. Absolutely. Nobody wants to do. Look, we do so much work at Tribe around accessibility. Yeah. And where almost all our projects fall down on accessibility.

It’s not the code cuz we know what we’re doing. It’s getting the content created to write alt tag descriptions on their images so that they pass. It’s getting like it’s all these tasks that are boring and mundane and and you know what? I think AI can fill that gap really comfortably and produce better accessible content, but either original.

I think that’s true around SEO as well. Like I think there are layers and layers around creating complete content that Google or. Honestly, let’s even, let’s admit it, maybe the next generation SEO isn’t gonna be for Google. I know Google Heart palpitating right now as it’s, yeah. But it might be, how do I create content that’s in gating so that the next generation of chatbot recommends it via Alexa when I get up in the morning or whatever.

And that may be a completely different approach to content creation.

Ben, you guys do a lot of WooCommerce work and solutions as part of Kadence. So I was having a conversation with the team at BigCommerce. For those of you don’t know, it’s a large SaaS, although they have a huge WordPress contribution arm there. Freaking awesome. And I was asking them like, what are you doing around AI? And they said we went out to a lot of our audience to try to figure out where they’re struggling the most.

And product descriptions is where the average small business owner just really struggles. How do you create accurate, compelling product descriptions? And so they’re like, that’s what we’re R ending right now. It’s can we get the chop bot to create not fluff? But actual compelling, accurate, useful ones.

Are you seeing anybody in the WooCommerce world working on that problem yet? I haven’t run across anybody who’s oh, I’m on that.

Ben: Yeah, I wonder about that. So even what, like recently Elementor did with AI. The tools that I so I’m a big fan of Grammarly, which just release their AI stuff.

I feel like so much of like just the straight text build, give me just a thing of text, like product description article. Yeah. I feel like that’s going to come from tools like Grammarly or just your like browser or like next level up. Then the end tools. So like to me, why do I need a tool in WooCommerce to build a product description when Grammarly will do it for me and I already pay for Grammarly and it’s on all of my browsers and everywhere I go and.

Including my phone and everything I need is right there. So whether it’s a product description or not, like to me, I feel like that’s next level up.

Shane: That’s straight prompt integration. You’re dead on. I think all these people running around integrating prompts. Cool. But I’m with you. Like even to the point of translation, like I was having a big debate with a team of translate press and WPML and I was like, I know WordPress has declared our next core initiative is internationalization, but did we take too long? Are we just to the point where my browser is about to just effectively translate everything for me all the time anyways and make all your efforts irrelevant? Yeah. And, and the counterargument is yes, but the general language models are so far away from the technical and niche model areas of language.

That you’re safe for quite a while. Even to the point, so like I’d mentioned this Siteground project earlier that I was chatting with them about because we’re talking about how to use AI in support, so this is a bit of a pivot, but it’s super contextual and we were talking about the fact that a lot of our companies, ours included, are completely distributed, remote and global.

We’ve got customers all over the world. We have team all over the world. And one of the byproducts of that scenario is you often have somebody show up to your support and ask for technical help more often than not in English, cuz there’s a tacit understanding that English at that international language point.

Which it’s not their primary language, so they’re already struggling to get help in a non-native language. Then being attended by a support person, statistically, whose odds are English is their second, third, fourth language, also not their native language. And so you get two people working their asses off to give each other help in native tongue Google translate, deep L any of these, do a pretty damn good job until you’re starting to try to.

Explain WP-CLI command nuance and another foreign, and then it starts doing real weird stuff. It doesn’t work. And so one of the challenges that the Siteground team said, look, NIBIN working on this about two, three years now. Can we create a language model that deals with technical hosting server jargon in the WordPress world, and make sure that stuff gets translated correctly.

And then layer that on top of Google Translate and they’re like, our goal was never perfection. Our goal was could we get to the point where a customer could have a better experience if they’re working in their third language and our support teams working in their second language. Wow. Can we just beat that level?

Yeah. And they came out of the beta prototyping phase at the end of 2022 and as of 2023, they are now get, they’re now to the point where people come to support and they’re like just asking Russian, Polish, Spanish, German, Chinese, doesn’t matter. Just ask in your native language. Our team will get, it gets translated.

They reply in their native language and the customer satisfaction level is higher than it was before with everybody tried to use English.

Ben: Wow. That’s cool.

Shane: Ah. That to me, that’s yeah, and I can’t wait till my browser can do the same thing, but when I’m gonna do anything farfield, anything, any technical whatever, that is a much larger ask than a focused, specific technical exchange.

Ben: And so to that point, wrapping that all the way back to product descriptions, You are saying what we need is a language model that’s been trained on writing good product descriptions, not just a language model that can, that’s trained on the web, but a language model that’s very specific to product descriptions.

So you are writing, you’re prompting it with simpler prompt, cuz we, if you’ve been playing around with open ai, it’s all about the prompt, but you’re getting a simpler prompt and you’re getting a better response, a much more technical response about your specific product.

Shane: One that has access to deeper data pools.

Look we did a huge project for Steelcase, which is a larger, furniture manufacturer that produced in all over the world. And one of the things we’re able to do when we’re working with it a few years ago was get access to their technical specifications of everything they’ve ever produced.

That’s not public data. But if you had a language model whose whole point is to write product descriptions, who has access to the technical spec catalog of all this company’s products and that the manufacturer’s willing to do that because they understand the value that it’s going to create. Now that starts getting interesting.

It’s not like a bot just trying to absorb random shit off the internet. It might have the wrong thing and it might have the right thing and has weird stuff that other people did that are fictions and then it’s pretty no. Hey, You. Like I need you to go absorb the technical specs of every airline ever created.

Cool. Got that. Okay. Thanks Boeing. Thanks. Bye. Airbus. Thanks. Whatever. Okay. Now we can start to produce qual… because all these language models, what they depend on is good content. Content is where the future of these models is. And so I think when we start getting to that point, then we’re gonna start seeing really interesting things produced.

Ben: Yeah. So let’s pause for a second. Let’s just talk about what Kadence is working on. Okay. Kinda give an overview of how we’re approaching our first version of AI and then from there, cuz Shane, you’re a big part of this project, so why don’t you give us your take of what we’re trying to do because this is like a joint effort between Kadence and Modern Tribe.

Shane: Cool. So we, we came to Ben with a bit of a vision, which is hey, Kadence is phenomenal for a wide set of people, especially technical people who have a vision on how to build a website. Wanna bring that complexity down, want a lot of flexibility.

I wonder if we can use AI to make it easier for the non-technical person. That’s where this whole conversation started. Some of that evolved around pattern creation and some of it is just a simpler admin, but some of it was also like, if we. If we know what the web project is and the context around it we can start to create and populate realistic experiences.

So rather than getting, when you get content library and you get these patterns, WordPress has that, Kadence Cloud, all these patterns. Instead of having outlines or wire frames or something, a designer rendered can we take your context, your yoga studio in Poland doing whatever, and populate these outlines with realistic content, realistic photos, pre-written content, get you to the point where you don’t have to invent it.

Like I, I’ve watched my kids play. Little kids are great if you pour Legos, but if you just pour a giant box of Legos with no structure in front of most adults, They just stare at it for a long time and then find something else to do. On the other hand, my daughter is 14. I’ve watched her, she has a number of WordPress sites.

You know how she creates content, she finds a pattern she likes, she’s okay, cool. That’s close enough. And then she takes that and tweaks it. And so the vision was to get AI to create your website, your pages, your content close enough. That within a couple minutes you’re rearing to go. You make your tweaks, you’re good to go.

So that, that’s the concept.

Ben: Yep. And I think with that it’s really about helping people in different stages. So there’s one, you’ve got a brand new website that you’re trying to build. How quickly can we get you to a place where you feel comfortable launching that site? Because that is so often the hurdle with people, they have a good idea, they have something they want to try or get out into the web, and then they never get to that launch thing because it just, It became hard.

They realized, ah, I’ve still gotta write five more pages and I’m done with this. And I just, then they, and so how do we get those people? Further along and much more satisfied with their end product than if they had to do a bunch of manual work or thinking of okay, I want it about page, but I wrote a paragraph about me cuz I don’t know what else to write and now what do I do?

And then they’re scanning the web for other people’s about pages and what do they put on it and how do I, and all this brain power. To try to figure out an about page. And honestly, it’s a page that almost nobody goes to, right?

Shane: But that’s true on all pages. Yeah. Yeah. If you talk to any freelancer, any agency out there, and you’re like, “Hey, how many of your projects launch on time?”

And if they’re honest, they’ll be like, almost none of them. And then you ask why. And 80% of time the actual answer is, the site user didn’t actually create the content I asked them to. And either I’m writing it for them or I’m dragging it out of them syllable by syllable. And cuz it’s hard cuz they don’t how to go.

And I think as a freelancer being able to take this and be like, here I’m gonna prefill all of this for you. Yeah. Now make it your own is such an achievable ask from an end customer. Yeah. Versus giving an empty template that looked beautiful. But doesn’t actually doesn’t get them across that hurdle.

Yep.

Ben: Especially for me, cuz and I’ve, this is one of the things I’ve used chatbot for the most is “Hey, rewrite this.” This with this like or add this to this. Like just you gave me this set of content and it was okay, but it wasn’t really right. So I wanted you to update it, but I still didn’t go update it myself.

I still asked Chatbot to update it and it’s that like ability inside of the product of like how can we not only get you started, but then also let you like tweak and use the tools of AI’s tweak? I love being able to say give me three different versions of this sentence. And it’s so helpful to see oh, that, that worded it so much better and was what it was going for.

But yeah, so we want to get those people starting out, but then we also want to get people who are just building a landing page. How do we make that a much better experience than, okay, I got to this landing page and I have a white blank page, and now what do I do? And if we can get. All of that to a much better thing.

So taking AI along with a lot of our human work in creating converting pages, the layout, thinking about the layout, thinking about the flow, and then getting AI to fill all those spots to where you’re not going. I need a hero section. Okay. So I’ll go ask for a headline and then now I need to go ask for a paragraph to go into that headline.

And maybe there should be an overline on that too. And I probably need a button, all of that, if we can give you that already prefilled, and then you can say, actually, I don’t want the overline, so I’m just gonna delete it. So much easier to delete than that. And yeah, allowing you to build pages that way where you’re thinking about pages.

With layout and content together and not as two separate kind of things. Or like even so many people build pages content first and then go, how do I make this look pretty? Which is so hard to do.

Shane: Cause it’s hard too, cause like people don’t realize how big or many of you probably do realize how big a role imagery plays in setting the emotional tone and context. You know a lot, we hear a lot about ChatGPT writing, text, writing prompts, et cetera. Using an AI that’s part of it. Without question, we’re filling out full blocks. We, in our case this project, with Kadence is not just look. I think I, I played with Elementor New and what they did is they integrated prompts into Elementor.

Cool. It’s useful, it’s practical. It’s not enough now. I doubt they’re gonna stop there, either. We’re all working on this stuff and but I think what’s far more interesting is when it comes in and goes Oh, you wanna write a four piece article that has these things. Cool. Here’s seven different versions of that.

What’s content pre-done based on what you said? Do any of these get you close? Yes. No? Okay. Yeah. Cool. Great. I’ll start with that one. Then. You’ve got all your layout content’s, one piece. The other piece is your media. And so for the first version of this, as much as we wanted to use generative, the reality is both A cost and B the complexity of inaccuracy.

It’s not quite ready for commercial for us, but there are big open like creative commons libraries like Pexels and others that we are able to access. We’re like, cool. Give us, oh, again, just, I’ll keep going with my yoga thing. Oh, you’re a yoga studio. Cool. Let me give you a bunch of yoga studios.

And what we’re trying to do is find that balance, cuz it’s not always obvious, right? Ben you know you, you got a whole camping food, is that right?

Ben: Yeah. Freeze dried food. Pinnacle Foods.

Shane: Yeah. So you got freeze-dried food. Thing is, if you’re gonna do a whole site about freeze-dried food, do you actually just want pictures of freeze dried food or do you want people in nature looking freaking happy? Having a great time. So part of that is trying to train. These models and ourselves to ask for the right things. When you pick an industry and understand that context, that’s work. So that’ll be in the A, but like I have future visions, like I want video. I want other creative common libraries.

I want you to be, as a user, I want you to be like, I don’t need your fake post ass art. Like I’ve got 10,000 photos in a Google Drive. Just please just leverage off mine. We’re close to being able to do that on the beta. Is that gonna make it in beta?

Ben: I think that’s gonna make it in beta where you can add your own photos, which is going to make, if you’re using the design library so much faster for you cuz it’s like there’s your photos already in it.

Shane: Yeah. So being able to do that will be, interesting to me. After that, I, we’ll see, there’s so many options. I really wanted to learn how to write in a voice. We’ve been doing a lot of experiments trying to teach it how to write my voice, and we’ve done dozens of dozens, dis versions, and some are better and some are worse.

Nothing’s quite nailed it, but think about if you’ve already got your site and it’s up and your WordPress author has 50 articles. There’s no reason why we can’t train the AI off your previous articles so that the next content that it generates is in your voice, like at least gets you going.

That is theoretically feasible. We’re just not to the point yet where we’re happy to put that in the beta. Yeah. But I want, it’s there, it’s close. We keep fighting for it. Yep.

Ben: Yeah. There’s so many things. Like our first integration is like, how do we solve this big problem that a lot of people have?

And obviously version one of that is gonna be way different than version two. There’s a lot of things we can do to add to that, but then it’s now that we’re in this and we’re already talking to open AI and all of that stuff, how do we do more inside of just all these different places? How do we take it to that next level?

And I’m really excited about all that’s gonna happen with Kadence AI.

Shane: Is there a way for people to sign up for some kind of beta? Have we gotten that far yet that people

Ben: We’re close. I think probably in the show notes for this, we could post that. We have a landing page started.

Ben: Yeah, no, Kathy, I, we both looked at that. Kathy sent me that this week. It was like, is this, how does this look? So yeah, we just need to publish that page and then we’ll have a place where people can sign up for information. Yeah.

Shane: Yes. As a note to all Ben is terrified of overpromising and disappointing you tell to come back and tell him that it’s okay. Yeah, we can put a thing out there and if we didn’t get it right first time, we’ll keep working on it. That’s what, that’s the challenge with some of this bleeding edge stuff.

Do you guys, like we’ve been working on this 10 months. We’ve rewritten it from scratch three times now. Why? Because the technology changed completely every three months it’s gonna do it again. And so as we’re trying to ride that knife, s edge between bleeding edge and cutting edge, Be patient with us, engage with us.

If you see something awesome that we should be doing or not aware of, or a library out there, help us out. It’s open source man contribute to saying,

Kathy: that’s one of the beautiful things about how Kadence has evolved is, Ben created Kadence Blocks before Gutenberg was ever a part of core. And this community of people who use Kadence and see the promise of what Kadence has been doing, have been involved in the development of Kadence as it’s moved forward. Even to this day, even as Ben has rewritten Kadence Blocks and basically foundationally changed the entire plugin. This community of people were involved in beta testing, that they were involved of saying, Hey, why can’t we do it this way?

So this is a very collaborative project with a community of people who are building more effective websites with Kadence and I can’t see this community saying, oh, AI, yeah, no, I’m not interested. They’re gonna be a part of this as well. So it’s gonna be a really exciting process as this comes out, as this comes to beta.

As people start playing with it, we expect, everybody in this very active and dynamic Kadence community to come forward and be a part of it. And say, Hey, wow, I did this. And can we also, and it’s. It’s going to just be this perfect feedback loop where Kadence is changing the world again.

Okay. Changing the way we build websites, it’s beautiful. Good job Ben.

Ben: That’s the goal. Okay. That’s the goal. Anyway.

Kathy: Cool. In the show notes you’ll see I’m gonna add my crazy AI pictures. So go for the comedy for that, but also absolutely worth. Yeah, Ben has seen my third hand, which I wish I really did have.

Cause you know, I’m sure I could do a lot more type back handy.

Shane: Very handy. Yes.

Kathy: I see what you did there. Maybe add some sound effects later, but yes, make sure that you go and you sign up to that that wait list. For when this comes out because we want you to see how this is gonna change not only the sites that you have now, but the builds that are coming your way in the future.

Cause this is gonna be useful across the board. Do we have any final parting thoughts? Anything else that people should consider with all this AI stuff?

Ben: I think just get out there and explore like some of the products that are coming out. Like it’s just really fun to see what people are doing. With it throughout the whole web, like from image generation to, just even different ways to prompt I think that’s all just really exciting and I think it’s worth like dipping your toes in and being like, let me play around with this a little bit.

Cuz you might be like, Hey, what if, I’m gonna start using it for this or that. So yeah.

Shane: So there’s this real challenge when you’re producing products on, do I need to solve that problem or do I just wait for Zendesk to solve that problem?

Do I need to solve this problem? Or will you know my browser solve that problem? And so it’s always hard to know where to invest that energy and building capacity. Realistically, all of your tools are actively transforming right now. So the number one thing, if you’re just in the field building great sites, helping customers pay a lot of attention to your tools right now.

That’s the first place I’d focus on. Focus on, what GitHub’s doing. Focus on what you know MailChimp is doing. Then focus on whatever your key tool set, pay a lot of attention. If you see that your tool set isn’t necessarily keeping up, that might be a good time to start exploring comparable tool sets to see what else they’re doing to bring value.

That’s where I would start. Should you pay 20 bucks a month to have a ChatGPT Pro license baby. Sure. Try it. See if you get value out of it. Learn to write prompts, but I think that’s, As much fun as I can’t tell you, whether in your day-to-day it’ll be useful. I found it moderately useful.

On the other hand, that transformation like tool set is I think where you’re gonna see a day-to-day change very quickly. And how you do work. And then ask yourself like obsessively on a regular basis, how and where do I provide value? And consider how that’s being impacted by these changes.

If you know you’re on Ben’s side of the equation and you’re like, yeah, man, nothing’s gonna unseat the value generation that I personally provide. Yeah, that’s great. If you’re on my side of the bench and you’re like, whew, I see a lot of change happening in my bathtub, then you can start to ask yourself, okay, cool.

Maybe there’s an area I can specialize in. Where I can increase that value that I’m creating, whether it’s through skills, whether it’s through partnerships. Maybe the answer is this is a case where one person plus another person doesn’t just create two, it creates 10 because you solve a much better breadth of problems.

I don’t know. I think there’s gonna be a transformation, so figure out how to navigate that gonna be really important.

Kathy: Great advice. Thoughts. And if you are on Kadence social media and you see some clips from this episode posted that will be generated by AI as well, found a tool that will, you can just upload your podcast and it finds all the most important clips.

Shane: Will you also, we also run the transcript for this through a summarizer for ChatGPT and have it give me like the TL;DR version.

Kathy: I will, and I’ll put it in the show notes.

Shane: Amazing. That is great.

Kathy: AI is changing the way we communicate. It’s changing the way we produce content. But I still always feel like the human element is going to be a part of this, but I think discussions like this really help us understand the tools and how it makes our jobs easier, better and more fulfilling and less stressful.

And that’s what we’re here for. Thank you, Shane, so much for joining us for this episode. Yeah, we’re gonna have you back cause I think this conversation was incredible and as these emerging technologies with AI start to evolve, I’m sure there’s going to be more conversations that we can have that are gonna help the Kadence community get more out of what Kadence is doing and with everything else.

So thanks for joining us and we’ll talk to you next time.