I started drafting this reblog of Margaret McCaffrey’s most recent blog post earlier this morning and observed that the scope of AI assistance on WordPress has increased significantly and very quickly. In a short video, a WordPress Happiness Engineer talks about the possible uses of AI Agents on the platform. You can ask an AI Agent to redesign your website, or email the agent with your thoughts and requests. Or chat to them on Telegram or Slack (when did Slack arrive on the scene!).
In the video, the WordPress rep shares an image of a yoga studio. They demonstrate how you might ask AI to insert a sleeping cat onto one of the vacant mats in the studio. They draw an arrow and type something like ‘insert cat here’ and voila! a cat appears amid the handful of people. But who’s to say that the humans in the pic are real and not generated, or even that the studio isn’t simply the outcome of an earlier prompt? And that cat didn’t look particularly convincing! And then I thought: How do we even know that the Happiness Engineer delivering this tutorial is a real person. And does it matter. And is that a question or a rhetorical flourish?
And suddenly … well, I’d entered a philosophical hall of mirrors. What started with AI developments on WordPress ended up in distraction, somehow colliding with epistemological questions about truth and knowledge, then ontological questions about what intelligence and creativity even are, and eventually existential questions about what all of this means for us as humans …
It was time to get back to the reblog. Margaret’s post, linked at the top, touches on these very things: It starts out by musing on traditional versus digital books, paper versus pixels, and ends up beginning to consider the implications of AI for creativity.
And so, without further ado, let’s hit the ‘Publish’ button.
Time for a coffee and a Ginger Nut.
Happy reading,
EW
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thanks for bringing us up-to-date EW! Slash! Whatever next…
I have to say I think our happiness engineer is an AI construct. All I can say is, bring back people and paper, – Books that is.
I totally agree with Margaret’s musings.
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Sorry – the anonymous comment above is me – Helen
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🥸
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You’re welcome, Helen. Thanks for commenting.
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Thank you, Margaret.
I am, as usual, bewildered by the AI tsunami. First, it’s my hard-wired legal training. I am a wordsmith, and words are crucial to my worldview and management of my universe. What, exactly, IS Artificial Intelligence?
I certainly use things like SpellCheck, GPS, photo filters, and other tools that are drawing on algorithms and other forms of non-human expertise. That doesn’t seem like stealing or unfair use of other people’s work,
Yet, I would never throw a phrase into ChatGPT and ask for the text of an email. THAT would seem like, if not stealing, at least cheating.
Without a valid definition of the process, however, I am hesitant. Is my asking for “ice cream parlors near me” the same as “write an essay on changing seasons”?
All I can say for now is “I hope not.”
As the editor/publisher of a literary anthology, I test work for plagiarism and AI, but I recognize that it is problematic. Just to test some of the tools, I tested pieces I knew I had created (some years ago). They tools recognized my published written works pretty well, but were all over the map for images. They didn’t recognize an image created by a free app on my phone as AI, but deemed a picture of my cousin taken in the 1990s as “probably” AI, despite the fact that it was a cell phone snap of an actual photograph.
I certainly would love tools to do the dreary scut work of publishing, like making sure I have all the bios in alphabetical order, and haven’t missed anyone on the back cover. But I still rely on my human copy editor to make the book look look as perfect as, well, humanly possible.
So, hope for the best and prepare for the worst.
D Ferrara
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Well, D, I do know one thing: you don’t necessarily know where the ice cream parlours are in your area, but you do know how to write an essay about the ‘changing seasons’ and it is going to be more masterful than anything AI can come up with – ever.
On behalf of fellow Elwood Writers can I thank you for commenting. What a fascinating conversation they have opened up here.
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