#102 – Artemy Kaydash on Exploring AI and How It Will Alter the Workplace

Transcript

[00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.

Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case, how AI is transforming the workplace.

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So on the podcast today, we have Artemy Kaydash. Artemy is a WordPress and WooCommerce freelance developer who focuses on backend development. After realising his passion lay in back-end work, he shifted his focus from full stack development to creating, supporting, maintaining, and editing WordPress and WooCommerce plugins. He also runs a personal website where he shares his expertise through blogging about WordPress and WooCommerce.

Most of this episode centres around the impact of AI on the landscape of web development. We explore the implications of AI tools for web developers, firstly talking about the way that AI systems have rapidly become somewhat essential and the developer’s toolkit.

We discussed the pivotal role AI may have in the future and how it could become an indispensable time-saver, relegating many uninteresting tasks from needing to be carried out manually.

We get into the intersection of AI and web development, highlighting the need for developers to adapt and harness the potential of AI tools to remain at the forefront of innovation.

We deliberate on the potential ramifications of AI on job roles within the WordPress space, underscoring the enduring need for human expertise in deciphering customer wishes, refining marketing strategies, and crafting compelling design experiences.

Although Artamy is not sure how the future will unfold, it’s clear that he sees the present as a pivotal moment in which those who adapt to the realities of AI can flourish, whilst those who do not might be left behind. His perspective allows us to glimpse a future of web development in which AI can be a force for positive change, to be embraced, not feared.

If AI has piqued your curiosity in the past, especially in the WordPress space, this episode is for you.

I am joined on the podcast today by Artemy Kaydash. How are you doing, Artemy?

[00:03:34] Artemy Kaydash: I’m doing good. What about you?

[00:03:36] Nathan Wrigley: Good, thank you. Lovely to have you on. We’re going to talk today about AI, which is a really interesting subject. Something that personally is really fascinating to me. Before we get into that, Artemy, I wonder if you wouldn’t mind just spending a brief moment giving us your biography. How come you’re talking on a WordPress podcast today? What is your relationship with WordPress? What do you do for a living? That kind of thing.

[00:03:59] Artemy Kaydash: So I’m 24 years old. I’m a WordPress and WooCommerce freelance developer. I want to underline that I’m a backend developer. I used to be some kind of a full stack developer, but at some point in my life, I understood that I don’t like working with front end stuff. So I decided to focus on backend and today I create, support, maintain, and edit WordPress and WooCommerce plugins. That’s what I do.

I also have a, my personal website, where I blog about WordPress and WooCommerce. Where I share some of my knowledge. Where I teach people how to do some things with WooCommerce and WordPress. You can visit it. It’s kayart.dev. I guess that’s all you should know about me,

[00:04:45] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you so much. We will link to any URLs or sites or anything like that we mention. We’ll make sure to link to them in the show notes. So if you go to WP Tavern and search for this episode, you’ll be able to find all of the links in there. But we’re going to have a chat today about AI.

Now, I think I should probably say at the outset, I certainly am no expert in any way about AI. I am just curious. And, I would say more than that, I’m fascinated by it. I’m not always particularly enamoured by it. I’m not entirely sure that it’s always the best thing to pursue, but I am fascinated by it.

I don’t know what your credentials are, whether it’s something that you view Artemy, are you into the technology of this? Do you get yourself in the weeds of any code related to this? Or are you like me somebody that’s fascinated by what it’s doing?

[00:05:38] Artemy Kaydash: I think I’m more like you, I don’t know much about how AI works under the hood. I’m a big fan of philosophy and I think a lot about our future and what’s ahead of us. So of course, I’ve been thinking a lot about how AI will change the way we live, the way we work.

So I wrote some posts on LinkedIn about this, especially about the content creators. And you know, I’m excited but I think that there’s a lot of hype and marketing around this topic because you know, when I made my first steps in web development in 2017, some people already told me that in a few years there will be no demand in front end developers because, I don’t know if you ever used the Avocode app.

Avocode allows you to take a PSD template, from Photoshop, and it generates CSS for you. And then we had some tools like Figma, or something like this, that generated CSS on the fly. You create a figure and it generates CSS for it. Even then there were some people that thought that in a few years there will be no demand in HTML and CSS developers. And you know what? We are in 2023 and we still need front end developers.

Front end has become much more complex. We now have things like React, Vue and other front end frameworks. Those tools, they cannot solve these issues. I think that when a new tool comes up that allows you to automate some things, you can go on the next level. You can create much more complex things.

So I think that with AI, at least in the nearest future, that’s something that’s going to wait for us. AI will allow us to automate some simple, sometimes stupid, stuff that we hate to do because it’s boring.

For example, I don’t like writing HTML and CSS. So if ChatGPT is going to generate HTML and CSS for me, that’s great, because I want to focus on things that’s interesting for me. And I don’t think that, at least at the moment, at least in the state that ChatGPT has now, it can replace me absolutely. It can do some stuff for me, but it cannot replace me fully. That’s what I think.

[00:07:53] Nathan Wrigley: That’s one of the interesting things that we’ll probably chat through is whether or not we are going to be out of work, because of the advances in AI and the capabilities that they bring. But that’s a really interesting argument and an argument that I’m sure many people would share the outcomes that you just suggested. That the AI can increasingly take over the mundane, the uninteresting things that you may well have had to do, but also it allows us to do increasingly more complicated things.

So the things that were available to us as web developers 10 years ago, are no longer the things that we would use anymore. And perhaps in the future AI will enable us to do things as yet unimagined. I guess only the future will tell, but you don’t have an intuition, certainly at the moment, that anybody using AI could replace a human? You’re thinking more that it would be able to augment what they can do. Add on to what they can do. Reduce the amount of time it takes them to do things. Have I got that about right? Is that your position?

[00:08:57] Artemy Kaydash: It absolutely already can replace some people, especially if you’re talking about some manual stuff like, there are some people that they are paid for, okay, I have an Excel table and I need you to go through every cell and do something with this. And ChatGPT and similar tools, they can do something like this.

So the less intellectual your work is, the more is probability that your work is going to be replaced. So if you want to be in demand, if you want to keep up with these AI tools, you need to work on your intellectual skills, on your soft skills. You have to work on your, way of thinking. And of course, as a law of evolution, you have to adapt. You either adapt or die, unfortunately.

[00:09:47] Nathan Wrigley: Do you think then that one of the tools that you’ll have to have in the future? And again, let’s rewind the clock. If we were to go back 10 years, your suite of tools would be, I don’t know, some software which enabled you to write the code, plus a bunch of possibly books or online resources to enable you to take that knowledge and put it into your head and so on.

But do you imagine that in the future, using AI will be a prerequisite, an essential tool for anybody, just because, well simply from a time saving point of view, the fact that you don’t have to research everything yourself, and it may be able to fulfill, let’s say, a proportion, 50%, 30%, 90% of the tasks that you need to achieve. That will be an essential skill, aside from all the other things you need to know. You have to know how to write in in React. You have to know how to set up a server, whatever it is. But the AI will be your companion sitting there helping you, and it will be necessary because of the time benefits and all of that that it brings.

[00:10:48] Artemy Kaydash: Absolutely. 10 years ago, there were no package managers, there was no NPM, there was no packages or something like this. And now they are part of our life, and we cannot work without it. So I think that some AI tools, absolutely will be a part of our tool set.

And that’s fine, that’s great. They will allow us to do some stuff that we had to do manually earlier. That’s great. It means that we will have more time to focus on things that we do better. At least for now.

[00:11:16] Nathan Wrigley: Do you have any intuitions or have you played with AI and it fulfill what you needed to do? So I’ve played with AI fairly recently, probably in the last week or so, and I’m continually amazed by the things that it can achieve from a simple text prompt. So for example, the WordPress code base has been out, completely free, for everybody to examine for many, many, many years.

And so there’s no inhibition to all of the AI pieces of software, ChatGPT, and Claude and Anthropic, and all of the different pieces that you can go and look at. All of them have had access to that code. And so when I ask it to do something fairly straightforward in WordPress, something that I would have to sit down and write and think through. I am always bowled over by, a, how amazingly accurate it is in understanding what I wanted it to do. But also how clean the bits and pieces that it returns. Now sometimes it gives me something which is entirely unusable, but on the whole I am utterly amazed by how reliable and effective it is.

[00:12:23] Artemy Kaydash: I use ChatGPT and Bard sometimes. But I usually use it for, I think that every developer has some Stack Overflow threads that they are visiting regularly. Go to see the same answer every and every again, because they cannot remember it. So ChatGPT is good for these things.

Or sometimes I use ChatGPT to generate some boilerplate code for me, and it’s great. For example, as I told you before, there was a case when I worked on Dokan website. Dokan is a multi vendor plugin for WooCommerce. And I had to get some data about a vendor, if I’m not mistaken. And, when I asked ChatGPT to find an answer for me, how can I get this data using PHP and without MySQL, it just hallucinated some answers. It told me to use some methods that didn’t exist. So I still had to go to the source code. I had to find a class I need, and I had to find methods I need.

Or for example, there are some questions that do not have one single answer, you know. For example, how to structure your code? There’s no single answer. How to stylize your code? There’s no single answer. How to structure your classes? What should be the relations with each other? There are no single answer for this. So you have to think about it.

And that’s why, forums like Stack Overflow, they are still the thing, because there are some discussions of real people that have some experience behind their back. And you can read it, and you can make your own opinion about their opinions, and you can find your own way. And I think that ChatGPT, or other stuff, they won’t help you with this. Because it’s your decision, and you will take every blame for every error that ChatGPT will make.

[00:14:16] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I think that’s a really good point. It is definitely not perfect. But in some situations, it is remarkably close to perfect. But still, as we stand towards the end of 2023, you still need a human to judge whether or not what it has given you is perfect.

I do wonder if in the future, the inspection that humans need to apply to what AI gives us back. I do wonder if as time goes on, that will be less and less required, because it becomes more and more accurate. So for example, if we were to just look at the things that were output by, for example ChatGPT, in versions prior to what we’ve got now, there was definitely a difference in the quality of things.

If we were for example just to take the silly example of image creation. Now, I know that’s got nothing to do code, but it’s an interesting example. It was really easy to spot just 18 months ago, like really, really easy to spot that an AI made that picture of a human being. Because look at the fingers, look at the ears, there’s just clearly something is not quite right there.

However, if you were to run the same query today, it would be almost impossible to tell that a human being hadn’t been involved in that, because they have learnt along the way. So I do wonder whether or not we’ll need the humans to have that level of inspection in the future.

And that brings me to another point, this is something that I’ve considered a little bit. You, whilst you’re significantly younger than I am, put it that way, but you’re no longer a child, let’s say that. And you have managed to, since you were a child, you have managed to presumably be employed, be paid, be in work, in order to acquire the skills that you now have. And the reason that you have been able to have that work is because somebody needed to have you, for example, as an intern or as a junior developer, and you have acquired skills in steps, getting more and more difficult work as the years have gone by.

I wonder if the AI, if there’s a risk that it will knock out that bottom layer of people who get into the workplace at the intern level. Because why would we need to employ an intern? Because we now know that the AI can handle pretty much everything that an intern would have done. And so as time goes on, I wonder if there’s going to be a gap in people coming through, learning the technology, learning all the bits and pieces. So I wonder if that’s anything you’ve given thought to?

[00:16:48] Artemy Kaydash: Well, you cannot take a college graduate and make him as the CEO of your company, right? You still have to learn about your business. So yeah, of course AI will take some of their jobs. But you still, you cannot jump through the levels. You have to go your way. You have to learn your, what you need. You have to live through your experience and there is no way to escape this. So I think that the company owners will still take interns. Maybe they will pay them less I guess, maybe, who knows. But still people need to gain their experience. There is no way to escape this.

[00:17:22] Nathan Wrigley: I guess that may be the concern of people who are worried about AI, is that we just have to think through these problems in advance, so that we’re not 20 years from now, looking back and saying, boy, we, we really haven’t had any interns getting through our company and now 20 years on, we’ve got nobody left to fulfill these positions. What do we do?

[00:17:45] Artemy Kaydash: That’s the people natures, right?

[00:17:47] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, but obviously in your own business, that’s an easy one to fix. You just make that decision. If as a nation or as an industry, we don’t consciously think about that, there is a risk that, Well, it’s okay, the other businesses out there, they won’t farm everything out to the AI. So I’ll be able to employ people who grew up and went through their internship. And that’s fine. But if we’re all doing it, then there’ll just be this deficit of people. Who knows, maybe that won’t be the case.

Let’s move the conversation a little bit. And I’m going to mention the LinkedIn posts that you wrote, that the URLs for those are far too long to give out. So I’ll just say go to the show notes and have a look. But you wrote a couple of pieces over on LinkedIn where you shared your concerns about AI hoovering up, vacuuming up, all of the knowledge that we’ve put out there, so blog posts and what have you. And whether or not there’s like an ethical problem, or something that we ought to be able to stop the AI from doing that.

So do you just want to outline, you don’t really give a position on this. You don’t say whether you think it’s right or wrong, but you highlight it as a potential issue in the future. Do you just want to go through that?

[00:18:52] Artemy Kaydash: Well, of course it’s bad. These AI tools, and the companies behind them, they take your content and use it to make money, and they don’t share this money with you. Of course, it’s bad for me. But you know, it is what it is. You have to accept this rule because you cannot change them. So you have to adapt.

And as I said in those posts, you cannot protect your content like fully. And in one of those posts I mentioned an article on The Register where the site, the CEO of Medium, it’s a huge publishing platform, so they have a lot of content. And I’m sorry, I don’t remember his name, but he told that yeah, we try to block AI crawlers from our website. But still there are some companies that scrape our data, and then they sell this data to OpenAI or Google or someone else.

So, yeah, you can block some AI crawlers, very specific crawlers. But there will come more of them and you cannot block all of them. It’s like an arms racing, right? Websites have been trying to block AI Crawlers for ages, and no one could do this, and you cannot do this. Because when you create a new wall that they have to go through, you will come up with an idea how to go through this wall, and then a new wall and you come up with a new idea. So it’s a constant process, and you cannot stop it.

And I also tell that the only way to at least kind of protect your content is to use some, paywall features or something like this, or create a private group or something like this. As I told you before, you can automate these things as well. So if someone really want to take your content, they will find a way to take your content. And you cannot fully protect it. So you have to find ways to still, still be in demand. For example, I’m a content creator myself, because I have a website. I have a blog.

I blog about the WordPress, and just like Stack Overflow, I noticed that when ChatGPT has become public, traffic on my website has decreased. Of course because some people, they don’t go to Google anymore when they have a software question. They go straight to ChatGPT or Bard or something like this. And they ask these tools these questions. So they don’t need my website anymore.

And those companies just scraped, I think you can find my content in this tools because, I wrote some unique articles, and they couldn’t find any other answers. At least I think this way. So yeah, you have to adapt. And my answer about this is that you have to be unique because your content can be stolen, but your way of thinking, your unique life experience, your unique perspective, and sometimes your craziness. It cannot be simulated, at least for now.

[00:21:53] Nathan Wrigley: That’s a really good answer. I like that little bit at the end. This is interesting. So if we were to rewind the clock to the beginning of the internet, I get the intuition that it was a really different enterprise. The internet came around, hyperlinks were invented, all of a sudden things could connect to other things.

And then blogging began, and it was a real, a real moment of pride for people to set up their blog and put their voice out there and know that if search engines did their job correctly, those search engines would find your content and then people through the search engine would find their way back to you. And I still think that, although you could argue that Google may have interesting ways of surfacing your content that don’t necessarily lead back to your article. Broadly, the intention of a search engine is to go around the web, scrape it, and then for people to find themselves back at your site.

Whereas, although I think it’s a little trickle at the moment, of people who’ve moved away from search engines to ChatGPT, I can see a moment where the trickle becomes a bit of a stream. And then the stream becomes a bit of a tidal wave. Where if you want the answer to something, you’re not just trying to find something to read, but you just want the answer to a problem, then I think you’re right. I think people will increasingly go to the place where that answer will be given back to you, so an AI.

And then the problem is, what’s the incentive in writing anymore? Why would you write if you know for a fact that the vast majority of people will never see what you’ve written. It’s just going to be consumed by an AI, which will spit it out, give you no credit for it. There is a potential for it to ruin the enterprise of writing content in the first place, yeah?

[00:23:48] Artemy Kaydash: Well, you can think about this way, and I think some people will surely do this. But for example, what’s the point of listening to this podcast? We were just two guys, what was the point? But, I guess it means that some people are interested in my experience, in my way of thinking and your experience and your way of thinking.

There are some authors that I read, not because they create, not because they give me some answers, but they make me think. They have some good perspectives. And I can use these perspectives to create some of my own perspectives, right? So, it’s about thinking. It’s about reading something that, as I said before, there are some questions that do not have one single answer. You have to think about it.

So I think that bloggers will be more focused on this type of content, like my opinion on this, or my perspective on this, or what I think about this. Because, at least for now, ChatGPT doesn’t have any opinions. It can share some facts. And you can’t even be sure that these facts are real because it hallucinates sometimes.

[00:24:56] Nathan Wrigley: I do wonder if the AIs maybe need to do a better job of citing where they get things from. So in the example that you gave earlier, where you wrote a few posts, where you tackled something probably for the first time, and if somebody wanted to find the solution, you were the person that had provided it. So you’ve got an intuition that ChatGPT, in this case, had consumed your article, and when you went to find whether they had or not, you could write a question which clearly gave that content that you’d written back to yourself.

I do wonder if the AI could do a better job of saying, okay, the information that we’ve got came from this website and this website. Here’s the links that we used, that we scraped in order to find the content that we’ve just surfaced, which we’re sort of pretending we made up, but we didn’t really. So if they could give more information about where they’re getting their information, maybe that would help, provide that gap between what we have now with search engines, and what we have now with AI, where we don’t really know where the heck it got anything from.

[00:25:59] Artemy Kaydash: In the perfect world, yeah of course they should do this. And as I know, Bing AI already does this. If you ask Bing Chat about something, it doesn’t just give you an answer, it also provides you with some links it used to give this answer, and that’s great I think, But as I said, companies are not interested in you making money, right? They’re interested in making money for themselves. So, maybe if there will be some legal requirements that will make them to cite properly sources they use, and it’s something that would be great. As I said, there are always some workarounds. And I’m not sure if the companies behind these tools will not use these workarounds.

[00:26:43] Nathan Wrigley: That’s a good point. I think you’re right. So you made the point earlier that it doesn’t matter how clever you are in putting up a wall between your content and the internet. At some point you’ve got to allow people to get through that wall, and maybe the AIs will figure out how to get through that wall as well.

Yeah, it’s just an, I just think we’re on the precipice of something, or the opposite. We’re at the foot of a mountain and it’s, rather than it being a precipice that we’re about to fall into, which sounds really bad, maybe it’s a mountain that we’re just at the base of and we’re going to climb towards the summit.

I don’t really know. Certainly you mentioned earlier that certain jobs have already gone. If you were to look at the work of, I don’t know, crafting a spreadsheet, or amending a spreadsheet based upon something that your boss needed doing. That kind of work can now be done by AI. I wonder what your intuitions are as to the level of complexity that is going to be acquired by AI in the next few years.

So you mentioned at the top that you’re 24 years old. Is there any part of you that’s concerned about your job stability in the future? Do you think you’ve achieved a certain level of expertise where you’re immune? Or are you at that point where you’re looking over your shoulder thinking, I really do need to keep an eye on this because I’m afraid for my job? What do you think about that?

[00:28:02] Artemy Kaydash: Well, of course I cannot guarantee that in the future the AI tools could replace me or could not, because, who knows? Five years ago, we couldn’t even imagine that there will be things like DALL·E or something like this, and they do really great.

I don’t know, I really don’t know. The only thing I can guarantee, at least for myself, I’m still going to be a person I am. And I can work on my soft skills and I can adapt. Maybe I won’t be a WordPress developer in five years because ChatGPT will do, will create plugins for me. Well, maybe I will have to find a new job, who knows. But I’m pretty sure about myself, and I’m not pretty sure about my job, right.

[00:28:42] Nathan Wrigley: One of the interesting arguments that I heard recently, it’s a fairly pessimistic argument, I’ll put that out there right at the beginning, but the argument always goes a bit like, well, if we invent new technology, then obviously that will disrupt things, but there’ll always be new opportunities created. So, if 5,000 people lose their jobs over here, what will happen is 5,000 other jobs, or something equivalent, will get created somewhere else. The technology will create a new branch of the workplace that we haven’t as yet imagined, and that will be where those people will go, once they’ve figured out how to adapt and what have you. So it’s this constant process of improvement, alteration, and finding where you fit into this new jigsaw puzzle of the technological landscape.

One of the arguments that I heard recently was that this could be the first time where that argument doesn’t really hold. And the argument went a bit like this. In every other technological innovation, humans have been able to move out of the thing which was innovated into, and they’ve been able to go to somewhere else, because now we’ve got something, there’s some space available. So a good example would be the industrial revolution, where machines were made to move things, drill holes through things, lift things.

In other words, the machines took the physical things that we needed to do, and it mechanized those, and so people moved from the sphere of physical work, and became more intellectual workers. However, if in this current revolution of AI, the AI also beats us at the intellectual enterprise, it’s better than us at thinking, it can do things more quickly. Where do humans go? What’s left? Machines are better lifting things than us. Machines are better thinking through things than us, well, we’re on a permanent holiday then, aren’t we? Don’t know if you’ve got any thoughts about that? If this technology is literally transformational because it’s consuming the last vestige of what we’ve got left, which is our brain, really.

[00:30:45] Artemy Kaydash: Philosophers and economists have discussed this topic even when ChatGPT wasn’t even a thing. So for example, like one of the possible scenarios, okay. We’ll have great AI tools that will do every job for us. Which means that we have like millions and billions of people without a job.

They still need to eat. They need to live somewhere. They need to drink something. One of the possible scenarios is that governments will have to like take some part of those big companies revenue and share it with people like, passive basic income, if I’m not mistaken, it’s called.

[00:31:25] Nathan Wrigley: Universal Basic Income, UBI. Yeah.

[00:31:27] Artemy Kaydash: Right. Maybe this scenario that waits for us. I don’t know.

[00:31:32] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. The truth is we really don’t know. It’ll be an interesting journey. Let’s just, before we round this off, let’s just ground this back into the WordPress space, because obviously that’s primarily what this podcast is about. What have you experienced over the last 18 months, it literally could have been last week, it could have been something from last year. Can you mention any things in the WordPress space connected with AI that you have found yourself being drawn to, coming back to, using, over the last period of time?

[00:32:00] Artemy Kaydash: In WordPress, I’m not sure. I saw that Jetpack now has some AI features, and some of the most popular SEO plugins already allow you to like generate meta descriptions or something like this. I know about this feature, but I don’t use them for now. And I think that Gutenberg has some potential for AI features.

Elementor, I actually used Elementor AI features, and Divi AI features. It’s not perfect right now, but I think it’s great that you can tell those builders, like I want to have a section with an image, and a text in the center of it, and it generates it. You didn’t have to code it. You didn’t have to write HTML and CSS what I had. So these tools can be very useful in this case. And I think that Gutenberg may have something like this.

[00:32:50] Nathan Wrigley: I think the content piece, the creation of content, just getting yourself over the hurdle of that blank page. If it can create some content for you, which then you can tweak, make it your own. But you’re right, the whole enterprise of laying things out, once you’ve done that a hundred times, it’s probably not as interesting as it was the first time. And if you can get the AI to do those kinds of things, and then you adapt it within the tool that you’re using, whether that’s a page builder or the block editor or whatever. Yeah, that’s really interesting.

And I think we’re moving into a future where the whole site is potentially under the purview of AI. The moment you first log into WordPress, it seems like there’s a lot of tools coming down the pike at the moment that will ask you a series of questions. It’s like an onboarding to the creation of your website, and based upon the answers that you give it, it will create a bunch of pages. An about page, a contact page. It will style it. It will give it colors. It will put content in there, which is not the content that you want, but it approximates what you want.

It knows, for example, that you’re a baker. And so it puts in pictures of baking, and it will have text which is adjacent to the baking industry, and that kind of thing. So I feel that all of that is coming. And again, I guess it sends us right back to the beginning of our conversation. Whilst that’s brilliant on the one hand, it does also raise concerns about the long term future of many of the jobs that we’ve been doing for the last 10 or 15 years and whether or not we need to adapt.

[00:34:21] Artemy Kaydash: As I said before, we can use these tools as our tools, not like our replacements, right. So for example, if I need a website, and I need a good website that’s going to attract some customers, I still need to have an understanding of what people are looking for, what are their preferences?

I need to understand some marketing stuff, some design stuff. Yeah, I think that if you want a basic website, of course you can already use some of these tools to create this website. But they won’t be perfect. they won’t be so detailed for a specific customers you try to attract. And in this case you need designers, you need marketers, you need developers, that’s going to take this basic website and they will make a perfect website from it. It will allow you to spend less money on this, but you still need an expert’s perspective on this.

[00:35:20] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I think you’re right. It’s easy to forget because the things like ChatGPT, because their responses are so really remarkable, it is easy to forget that basically at its heart it isn’t yet, I say yet, it isn’t yet intelligent. It mimics intelligence. It’s giving us the next word and the word after that and the word after that, or the pixel next to that and the pixel next to that, whatever it may be.

And it mimics brilliantly based upon the consumption of lots of previous human knowledge. But you’re right, it doesn’t cut to the heart of what a human can do. And the human having more experience about, it’s not just a website. It’s a website where we have to throw SEO, in because that’s a piece of the puzzle. We have to throw in the marketing. We have to throw in what humans do, because UX and UI, that’s important as well, if we want people to actually make use of this website. It’s got to behave in a certain way.

It’s easy to forget that as of 2023, no AI is capable of taking this job on, it can make things look nice. It can pretend to be intelligent, but as yet, it truly isn’t. And so, yeah, adapting, being novel, creating a new future for yourself based upon what the AI can bring seems like the road to go.

Artemy, thank you so much for joining us today. Just before we leave, if people have been intrigued by this conversation and they want to talk to you about AI or anything in particular, is there a place where we could send them? I will, of course, link to your website, but you may want to mention that again, but is there like a social network that you use that you want to drop? Anything like that.

[00:37:03] Artemy Kaydash: My website contains all social links I use. You can also try to connect me on LinkedIn or you can drop me an email.

[00:37:10] Nathan Wrigley: Artemy, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast today. I really appreciate it.

[00:37:16] Artemy Kaydash: Thank you.

On the podcast today, we have Artemy Kaydash.

Artemy is a WordPress and WooCommerce freelance developer who focuses on backend development. After realising his passion lay in back-end work, he shifted his focus from full stack development to creating, supporting, maintaining, and editing WordPress and WooCommerce plugins. He also runs a personal website where he shares his expertise through blogging about WordPress and WooCommerce.

Most of this episode centres around the impact of AI on the landscape of web development. We explore the implications of AI tools for web developers, firstly talking about the way that AI systems have rapidly become somewhat essential and the developer’s toolkit.

We discussed the pivotal role AI may have in the future and how it could become an indispensable time-saver, relegating many uninteresting tasks from needing to be carried out manually.

We get into the intersection of AI and web development, highlighting the need for developers to adapt and harness the potential of AI tools to remain at the forefront of innovation.

We deliberate on the potential ramifications of AI on job roles within the WordPress space, underscoring the enduring need for human expertise in deciphering customer wishes, refining marketing strategies, and crafting compelling design experiences.

Although Artamy is not sure how the future will unfold, it’s clear that he sees the present as a pivotal moment in which those who adapt to the realities of AI can flourish, whilst those who do not might be left behind. His perspective allows us to glimpse a future of web development in which AI can be a force for positive change, to be embraced, not feared.

If AI has piqued your curiosity in the past, especially in the WordPress space, this episode is for you.

Useful links

Artemy’s website

LinkedIn post #1 mentioned in the podcast

LinkedIn post #2 mentioned in the podcast

ChatGPT

Bard

Claude

Dokan website

Bing Chat

DALL·E

Jetpack AI

Elementor AI

Divi AI