It’s exciting times for us web-folk now that Artificial Intelligence is on the horizon, and here at Webbed Feet we are already using it.
It’s an invaluable tool when it comes to content ideas (ChatGPT), images (MidJourney), editing images (Stable Diffusion and Firefly) and debugging/coding (ChatGPT)… but this nothing new, well compared to other AI.
The question is how are we thinking AI will be integrated in to our sites moving forward using APIs (application interfaces – i.e. making our software ‘talk’ to AI services).
To demonstrate what’s possible, let’s consider with a simple product, a blog.
Wouldn’t it be great if you could write a blog, then click a button to change the tone of it. With one click it could be formal, chatty, it could rhyme, sound like a pirate ('arr), or be turned in to a story for a child.
ChatGPT is pretty good at translations, and as such you could manage multi-language sites so easily with the CMS (content management system) automatically translating blog posts or pages in to the relevant languages.
On the home page of a website, you often see the first paragraph of a blog article, but if you look at this article, that would be “It’s exciting times for us web-folk now that Artificial Intelligence is on the horizon, and here at Webbed Feet we are already using it.”, which isn’t representative of what this article is about. Rather than asking a user to write a snippet, you could get AI to do this for you and cut it to the correct length. It could also create titles, descriptions and headings and ensure that they are the correct length.
With SEO in mind, it could edit these titles, descriptions and headings, but also create an optimised URL, and even integrate keywords in to user-provided content.
Although it would need to be used carefully, a CMS could even have a 'finish this article' button, 'make article shorter' or 'split article in to two halves'. Suddenly writing articles could be made considerably easier.
Whether this is a good idea is debatable, but social media ‘share’ buttons could also be improved, with social media integration, where the article is not only posted to various social media platforms, but AI could reply to comments on your behalf.
The advantages are not just restricted to language-model AI's. For example, AI could automatically create a suitable image or icon for the article, and use set of filters to keep it consistent with others. This could of course be overridden by the user as they write the article.
There is always the issue where users’ images are not good enough for the web, for example the user may be uploading a photo of a car, and the photographer was too close, so as soon as the image is cropped, parts of the car disappear. This is not an issue with AI as the background can be automatically extended, seamlessly adding more trees or grass. Also, the image could be cropped in such a way that the car is central.
If a user uploads an image, it could be too small and grainy, and AI can sharpen this. Similarly, it can improve the weather or, taken one step further, potentially used to remove or change unwanted elements.
Although not essential, it’s currently recommended that a human writes the article (here is an example of a solely AI generated one), but the tools that AI can offer to assist the user are huge.
The main issue being that AI currently recycles existing information in some form, so you need humans for ideas and innovation. But with machine learning progressing as it is, will this be this way forever? Will AI create blogs about things never yet thought about by humans? I guess that’s another article!
We are Webbed Feet, we are excited for the future.