[00:00:20] Nathan Wrigley: Hello there and welcome once again to the WP Builds podcast. You've reached episode number 462, entitled debating AI's impact with Jamie Marsland, content, creativity, slop, and the future of WordPress. It was published on Thursday, the 26th of March, 2026.
My name's Nathan Wrigley, and before we begin the episode with Jamie, just a few short bits of housekeeping if you like.
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Okey dokie. What have we got for you today? Well, this is a bit of a departure. Today I am having a debate. I don't think I've had a debate before, maybe I have, I can't remember. But I'm talking to Jamie Marsland.
Jamie has an enormous YouTube channel. He's the head of YouTube for Automattic, so he is very. Influential in the WordPress space. And he has a proclivity for using AI. He's been doing absolutely loads with it. It's very credible, all the things that he's been doing. But we decided to have a debate, because I'm a bit more on the luddite, curmudgeonly side, and so I thought I would take on the role of the curmudgeon, and I would try to persuade him that we need to slow down, put on the brake, stop using AI for every single thing.
And so you'll have to make of it what you will. Perhaps you regard my arguments as the way forward. Perhaps you think he's got the right track. I don't really know who wins this debate. Well, I kind of do, and it's not Jamie, but anyway, you go decide for yourself. It was very fun recording it, and I hope that you enjoy it.
I'm joined on the podcast again by Jamie Marsland. Hello, Jamie.
[00:03:46] Jamie Marsland: Hey, it's been a while, so hello?
[00:03:48] Nathan Wrigley: It's okay. It's fine. It, doesn't matter how many times you come on. I'm more than happy, to have you. We're gonna have an interesting chat today because, Jamie and I are gonna take opposite sides of, an argument, which I've never done before. We've ne, I've never set out at the beginning of a podcast to be a protagonist in one way, shape, or form.
But we're gonna have the AI debate. It may stretch well beyond WordPress. I've got a feeling that the discussion that we're gonna have is gonna stray out into just wider societal things, but, AI is the, debate. Jamie has been using AI for ages, but tell us just before we begin, just tell us about who you are in case anybody doesn't know.
[00:04:26] Jamie Marsland: Okay. I am Jamie Marsland. I work for Automatic as head of YouTube. and I have my own YouTube channel as well, which you can find me at Jamie Wp, where I, have loads of tutorials around WordPress. I've got about 200 as an 11,000 subscribers. And you can find, I dunno, why I'm promoting my socials at the start.
[00:04:46] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.
[00:04:48] Jamie Marsland: and you can find me on X at, poodle Press and I'm steeped in WordPress, but I've been, playing with AI a lot over
[00:04:58] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, you have been playing with AI a lot. I remember. This is, this goes back quite a while, so you'd been playing with ai, you were one of the first people I think that I spotted in the WordPress space that was creating content around ai. So it wasn't as soon as AI sort of came onto the market, but it was as soon as some of these tools came out, which many of them may have gone out of existence.
I don't know at this point. But you and I were both at Word Camp Asia. You'd been playing around with things and we got into this conversation at this social thing at the end of the evening and I came up with this idea of this thing that I thought, let's see if you can build this. And then I remember waking up the next morning
[00:05:36] Jamie Marsland: Oh yeah, I forgot about
[00:05:36] Nathan Wrigley: you'd sent me a message at some point during the night and you'd gone back to your hotel and basically built what in the past, prior to ai probably would've taken a team.
Days, dare I say, weeks to build. And you'd thrown this thing together and it, was just a fun project. It wasn't supposed to sort of go on and do anything, but it was, around capturing photographs and things like that. But, the point was you went home, did something impressive all by yourself, and out it came.
And, and I remember thinking, okay, he's probably onto something, however. A lot of water has gone under the bridge now, and so during this episode, I'm going to lean into the Domer, on the AI side of things. For every positive thing that you come out with, I'm going to try and kill it with a negative thing.
[00:06:26] Jamie Marsland: you're not gonna be able to do that 'cause I've got some good stuff
[00:06:28] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, well, I'll have to, I'll have to react in that case, but the point is, this episode is not a normal one. I'm gonna sort of try to encourage the conversation to develop, but at the same time, I'm gonna try and portray a may. Maybe the other side, I, am not actually against it, but I'm, I think there's a bit of me, which is slightly concerned, but I'm gonna lean into that.
So, caveat emptor, dear listener. What I say in the next half an hour or so is not probably what I actually think. So there we go. Okay, so tell us where we're at then, Jamie. the month is February 20, 26.
[00:06:59] Jamie Marsland: Yeah.
[00:06:59] Nathan Wrigley: You, before we started the call, said you'd had a bit of an epiphany last night. Tell us about that.
[00:07:04] Jamie Marsland: So last week, wordpress.com did a, partnership with Claude. And so now you can go onto Claude and search for a connector, and one of those connectors is wordpress.com. And if you connect your wordpress.com website to Claude, you can now chat to your WordPress site using Claude, the desktop version.
Now, the really pivotal bit, the kind of eureka moment for me is. It understands the entire context of your website. And that's a really, that's a really key thing. So it doesn't just let you create content or write content, it sees you, it sees your entire website, and so it knows your entire website.
So I've only been playing with it for a few hours, but I've, I've done some cool stuff with it. And actually before this, we were chatting about some of the stuff you think we could do with it, which was better than mine. But I've, I did the classic stuff, like I one shotted a landing page, but it didn't just create a landing page.
It, knew my, website design, so it created that landing page in the style of my website. It was just,
[00:08:07] Nathan Wrigley: What if we don't have any existing content? What if we're just
[00:08:10] Jamie Marsland: well, then you've got to tell it what to do. And you could upload an image, you can talk to it. It's a, it is a really good sort of code designer. and I also did things like I, so I did a few other things.
I said, right from my website, extract a brand guidelines and send it to my agency. And within about five minutes, it created this beautiful brand guidelines document that I could send to an agency to go off and create me some more collateral. That was interesting. and then I said, analyze my com, a competitor.
I put in a competitor and I said, analyze their website, compare it to my website. Come up with an SEO plan. Oh, and also create five posts. And it went and did it. That was interesting. And then the final thing I said is that I said, do a gap analysis on my website and a competitor's website. Not an SEO analysis, but it's just gap analysis.
Go and do that. And it came back and gave me some great recommendations for how, I could improve my website. So it's, no longer just a tool that you can use to create some nice content. It's like a strategic partner that sees and understands the soul of your websites. And I, that was just like two hours.
I was just playing with this thinking about, what I could do with it.
[00:09:21] Nathan Wrigley: So
[00:09:22] Jamie Marsland: the, big change is the context. It
[00:09:23] Nathan Wrigley: so is that context of the brand new bit then? So the context is the bit that let's say a week ago before that came out, that was just something you couldn't do. You would tell it to create a piece of content and it would do that in isolation and Okay. Okay.
So
[00:09:37] Jamie Marsland: You could, give it context, like you could upload, you could do that, but this just knows context. So it's just, like having a designer that's. Worked and it was actually talking to me saying, oh, we built this site together so I know, what it is and I know your thought.
And I, at one point I said, I, 'cause I was building like this yoga website and I said, I wanna run a yoga retreat. And it knew the tone of voice of my website. And the landing page wasn't just a design, it was in the tone of voice of my website. It was like, oh, that's, astonishing.
[00:10:08] Nathan Wrigley: I just be clear? I don't think you said what I think you said, did you just say a Yoda retreat? Like the character from Star Wars?
[00:10:16] Jamie Marsland: Yeah, they're very, no,
[00:10:18] Nathan Wrigley: yoga,
of course. Yeah. That's so obvious now. Okay. A yoga retreat. Yes.
[00:10:23] Jamie Marsland: If you've got two choices and you're going yoga or yoga,
[00:10:26] Nathan Wrigley: be honest with you, I know which one
[00:10:30] Jamie Marsland: how you went to yoga.
[00:10:32] Nathan Wrigley: Oh,
[00:10:32] Jamie Marsland: the obvious
[00:10:33] Nathan Wrigley: okay. So here we go. in terms of the content, right? So forget all of the context and all of that wonderful stuff around here. So here's, my first sort of slightly confrontational thing. Who's reading this content? Jamie, honestly.
[00:10:47] Jamie Marsland: Well, my wife has a yoga business.
[00:10:49] Nathan Wrigley: I'm hearing it again, but I, know now.
[00:10:54] Jamie Marsland: yoga, good ears.
[00:10:56] Nathan Wrigley: No, but seriously, it's so, so the, interesting thing that you said that, and I think you said five pieces of content. Okay. With five pieces of content. let's multiply that number because, there's no difference pre presumably. Maybe there's a. Dollar difference or a cent difference or whatever it may be in creating a hundred pieces of content.
we were already, the landscape was flooded. Nobody had time to read anything anyway. There's already too much content out there already. Is this just not a race to the bottom? The idea that you can create content with AI and just keep pushing it out and it will be discovered, yet, I can imagine that, another AI might get more context out of it, and that's wonderful.
Then you can create more content. But the, actual enterprise of the internet, presumably is to allow humans with actual eyeballs to go out, read the stuff, get something decent out of it, and then react
[00:11:45] Jamie Marsland: Yeah. Well, I would, let me hone in on just the landing page for the yoga retreat. My wife is actually running a yoga retreat in Portugal in May. go to Rosie glow.co uk to find out more information. There's two spaces left.
[00:11:57] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. I smuggled that in Nice.
[00:11:59] Jamie Marsland: and so she does have a, if she creates a really, beautiful landing page that's gonna convert and, she's gonna email her customers around this landing page, then it's, that has a, fundamental uplift in her business.
That's fantastic, isn't it? I would've thought that's a fairly clear cut and I see a
lot websites. I
[00:12:20] Nathan Wrigley: you've missed the bit that I was talking about, which was the landing page. Yes. I accept that it's more the 15 blog posts, the a hundred blog posts, the 2000 blog posts, and if we're in the, if, everybody is in the same business of creating 2000 blog posts and then the next 2000, yada, yada, we can, see that in a year's time we've shattered our attention so much.
There's so much content out
[00:12:43] Jamie Marsland: but you're not gonna read all those blog posts are you? You're gonna read, you're gonna read the best ones. when I go into a book shop, I always get one thing. I always get a little bit sad that I realized I'm never gonna be able to read all these books. But, we don't have a scarcity of books.
We have too many books. So, we only have 24 hours a day. We only have so much time to read stuff. There is all already many times more information that we can possibly consume. So my argument would be the good stuff will always come to the top. So if you are creating bad AI slop, nobody's gonna read it.
But if you're creating, if you are create, if you are using the tools to create. Better writing or better images or better storytelling then, it's just a tool. It's just a tool. And there's no, question You can create lots of terrible content with it, but we've had terrible content for a long time.
We have lots of terrible, we have lots of terrible books. We have loads of terrible films. I have loads of terrible.
[00:13:40] Nathan Wrigley: for years now.
[00:13:41] Jamie Marsland: Exactly. You're a great case study.
[00:13:43] Nathan Wrigley: Exactly. Yeah. No, seriously though. So, okay. I'm gonna, I'm gonna wind up the windows a little bit and be less confrontational about this bit, because I don't really use, AI to create content because obviously you and I were having a chat. This is, the content is two, three humans having a chat.
How, good is it now? with the context. So if, I was to go and use the exact same setup that you mentioned, the.com connected to Claude, and I would ask it to create, let's say, three blog posts, in all seriousness, how impressive are they these days? 'cause I'm getting the feeling that as e as each week goes by, the, capacity to distinguish what the human might have written as opposed to what the AI might have written is getting less and less
[00:14:25] Jamie Marsland: I just view as a tool, if you want prompt it, it's gonna be AI slop. But if you have interesting thoughts and you've thought about the world and you've thought about people and you talk to the AI, like it's a co-writer. And you're intellectually curious and it can take some of the grunt work, work away from you.
Then I think it, it can write really well, but there's loads of, there's loads of, there's loads of really good AI writing and, but there's much more terrible AI writing.
[00:14:53] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah,
[00:14:53] Jamie Marsland: But it's just a, it is just a, it's just a tool at the end of
[00:14:55] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I guess my sort of query is, and I honestly don't know what the search engine, let's assume that the search engines are still there. The, main method that many people are, actually getting to content. I, don't know what the, what the flags are for them in terms of, let's say that they, spot that a website is producing a piece of content each day.
I, just don't know what the heuristics are that they gather to figure out, this one is good, this one is poor. they're both 2000 words. They're both written in English. They both sound plausible. But one, if a human was to read it is just obvious junk. And one, if a human was to read it is much, just really profoundly thoughtful and clever and what have you.
I just dunno how the, the,
[00:15:36] Jamie Marsland: Well, it'll be, sorry to interrupt, but it'll be the, it'll be the traditional stuff, right? If people read it and share it, then the algorithm will recognize that, we're just coming off an industry, which is the affiliate industry where people were just creating, which WordPress.
Ru off to a large extent in terms of blogging. some of the stuff like where people were just creating, they were looking at content gaps in the algorithm and just piling out content, which was basically the equivalent of AI slop. So it's not like we're coming from a, not a lot's changed.
We're not like coming from a nirvana of amazing content over the last 15 years. A lot of the content that's been produced proportionally has been because they want to rank in search engines. And it's like, where can I buy this? Which is the. Top five plastic bottles in the uk, that kind of content.
So it's, it is not like this stuff is new, but good writing is always has a premium. I don't think that, I don't think that's, I don't think that's changed
[00:16:37] Nathan Wrigley: Do you, see, like, I, I can see this and I, think I'm longing for this in a way. I'm longing for a badge of authenticity to be on a website. And so, so for example, I love reading newspapers online because I know that they a human being. Well, I hope that a human being wrote that content and went out and did all of the different bits and pieces, but I also, I loved.
I love going back and reading blogs from people that I historically knew because I'm, pretty sure that they're still writing it. I, just don't know if we're heading into that future where being, an authentic voice and proving in some way, shape, or form that you sat and you did the writing might be something that people are interested in.
so knowing that I've got a badge, that badge proves with beyond a shadow of a doubt that I actually wrote this as opposed to ai.
[00:17:29] Jamie Marsland: So a few thoughts on that. Great question. One is I have seen where people have put at the bottom of their post this was, I used a, like chat two BT to scaffold this, but I wrote it. I've seen some of that stuff, which is quite,
[00:17:40] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, that's interesting. Okay. Yeah.
[00:17:42] Jamie Marsland: But then another question I'd put back to you is, there's two bits to writing In my view.
There's the thinking, very important. Yeah. You have to, learn to think to be a good writer. And then there's the actual. Drudgery of writing. So in one sense, if you are doing the thinking and AI is doing the writing, is that's my question to you. Is that so wrong? If you've put in all the hard work, which is like the thinking around the subject, coming up with the ideas, the intellectual curiosity of diving into this thing, and then you use AI actually just to surface some of your thoughts, do you have a problem with that?
[00:18:20] Nathan Wrigley: Well, it's interesting because you pass that as the, goal is to write, so that's the goal. And then you, you. sort of undermine yourself a little bit by saying the drudgery of writing. So if the goal is to write but you don't like writing, don't write.
[00:18:36] Jamie Marsland: Well, no, I like thinking
[00:18:37] Nathan Wrigley: Ah, well then think.
[00:18:39] Jamie Marsland: for, the peop, for the people that like thinking, but not less, not necessarily the writing is it, and that is it analogous to somebody that wants to make a film? But doesn't want to hire a film crew and doesn't want to go
[00:18:52] Nathan Wrigley: Yes. I do, I totally get your
[00:18:54] Jamie Marsland: you see what
[00:18:54] Nathan Wrigley: see what you mean. So, the sort of difficult bit of actually putting, the, idea ideation, I suppose is, the, interesting I lump myself into that category. I know what you mean. So I, love thinking. But the, whole blank page and the fact that it takes an hour to write, let's say, I don't know, 1500 words or something like that.
it's a kind of, it, it's the thing which annoys me is the amount of time and the amount of error I make. so yes, I, totally get what you mean. The, capacity to come up with the idea, but just distill it into 12 seconds, not four hours, is really compelling, isn't it?
[00:19:32] Jamie Marsland: And it might unlock a whole bunch of people like you. Like I, I'd like to know what's in your brain some of the time, not all the time, but if this unlocks, some of, unlocks, that you can get your creative thoughts out there in a, in the way that you want without the pain of going through some of that writing process.
I think I'm okay and I do have moments when I'm not okay with this, but I think I'm okay with that. I think that's fine.
[00:20:00] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it's interesting, I suppose at the end. the capacity to write is of interest to me for my stuff. And the capacity for you to write is of interest to you for, to you, for your stuff. But the ultimate ambition of writing online, if we were just writing for our own curiosity, I'd pick up a pen and I'd write on a pad, and that pad would probably gather dust in a corner.
But presumably the, endeavor here is to produce it so that other people can read it. And I feel like we're smuggling in a bit of a. A bit of, a little moment of disingenuity here in that if you are, proclaiming that this is your thought, it's your thought, but it's also a bit like me saying to my brother who's really good at writing, he's not.
But let's pretend he is. If I said to my brother, this is what I want to write,
[00:20:51] Jamie Marsland: Yeah.
[00:20:52] Nathan Wrigley: will you now write it for me? But I'll claim it's mine. That's weird, I know we've got these whole ghostwriting industry and what have you,
[00:21:01] Jamie Marsland: We do. Yeah.
[00:21:02] Nathan Wrigley: that's part of that whole thing.
But you know, you are sort of claiming ownership for something that you actually didn't do. You may have had the initial thought you had that, you were the thing that put the crystal in the Petri dish and boom, off it went, but you didn't do the writing some other. Creature in the universe did the writing, but we claim ownership.
And if we're claiming ownership, we have to, I don't know. I think I, I think there's something in the artistry. There's something in the, difficulty of things. There's overcoming that burden. There's learning the art. I know you play the guitar, right? You part of the
[00:21:39] Jamie Marsland: but I don't.
[00:21:39] Nathan Wrigley: of learning to play the guitar was the boring, Learning the chords, doing the scales, turn it up for the gig, sounding crap, but getting better over time. It's a journey, not a destination sort of thing.
[00:21:52] Jamie Marsland: But I don't think, I don't think you can be a good writer with AI unless you've done the hard work. In fact, I know you can't,
and I don't, when I play the guitar, I haven't made the guitar. I'm not making the noise. It's going through electronics and an amplifier.
[00:22:07] Nathan Wrigley: No, but you're not making a claim to be a guitar. You are making a claim to be a guitarist.
[00:22:12] Jamie Marsland: I am, well, I'm not even doing that. But yeah, I, I.
[00:22:15] Nathan Wrigley: making a claim to be a writer and you are not writing,
[00:22:19] Jamie Marsland: I'm not sure I am making claim to be a
[00:22:20] Nathan Wrigley: now, I don't mean you, I'm not singling you
[00:22:22] Jamie Marsland: but when I, if I am writing with ai, I'm not claiming to be a writer. I'm, trying to present my thoughts in the best way possible on a piece of
[00:22:29] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.
[00:22:30] Jamie Marsland: and the finished result is, and I find it very good for also the journey bit when you said about learning at the time, I do find it very useful in terms of helping me, Discuss it with AI and to actually collect my thoughts and I, find it helping the thinking process, so it's not a, for me anyway, it's not a click button process. It's a very collaborative process with AI where it's actually helping me discuss stuff and
[00:22:55] Nathan Wrigley: Do, you know what I think maybe, that's the bit that worries me, is that it becomes a click button. A click button process, and the default is to click the button, get it to write the thing, and then just click publish without the human sort of getting in and reading every word or, at the best skimming it.
[00:23:14] Jamie Marsland: But that, will,
[00:23:15] Nathan Wrigley: is the bit that bothers
[00:23:16] Jamie Marsland: yeah, but that's, here. And, you'll just create, nobody will read that. In my view, that's not interesting. 'cause it hasn't had the work. The work is in the thought. And the, and I was thinking about this morning in terms of ai, video, which is blowing up on at the moment with, seed.
Dance, whatever it's called, and the new, models coming out. And actually, it's like if you go to Pixar and, look at how much effort they put into script writing and the love that they put into that process. You can't short, you can't, you can, you can't shortcut that stuff. And that's where the.
That's where the value will be. It won't be in pressing a button and creating a video of a cat that's fighting, a dinosaur. That's, that's fine, but
[00:24:01] Nathan Wrigley: video so bad.
[00:24:03] Jamie Marsland: me too. But that's where the human, pathos and understanding the world and the work goes in and.
That's my view anyway. And, the people, the pe, the people that will be successful are the people that put the hard work in the foundational stuff like understanding storytelling or understanding their customers, all that stuff that AI doesn't, it, can help you, but if you just press the button, you'll just get the same as everyone
[00:24:28] Nathan Wrigley: Do you know, it's so interesting in that. Obviously, rewind the clock 10 years, we wouldn't have even been, like, this conversation just wasn't even on the table. It's, it would've been the realm of Star Trek, and yet here we are. But I, suppose the bit that, that, like everything you've just said is true in that if you curate and you, you, finesse your art form and you become really good at it.
the intention is that you rise to the top and all the ai slop falls to the bottom. That works in a scenario in which. You get discovered, and then people coalesce to you. But I suppose in a landscape where there's a trillion pieces of content being created every day, that discovery bit is also getting under mine, presumably, because it just becomes harder for, you to get that first leg on the, ladder, the first rung on the ladder, because there's, you've gotta compete against the trillion other bits, and you know that's, I think, part of the, thing as
[00:25:28] Jamie Marsland: but I, can, I'll push back on that a bit. Like when we were growing up, Nathan, how would, we have got discovered? We would've, if we wanted to start a business back in the day. in my view, there's never been a better time to be discovered. They've got all these incredible tools.
they've got, they've literally got a, network where they can talk to, pretty much like there was that piece that came out yesterday. The ai, I dunno if you read it, the long piece around ai, I think it's been viewed 70 million times
[00:25:58] Nathan Wrigley: In a day.
[00:25:59] Jamie Marsland: In a day. In one day. So. We have distribution and human beings are really good at filtering.
They, we are really good at filtering. so I, I get the kind of. Concerns over, there's gonna be one AI and it's gonna control everything. But generally humans are, we sniff out the good stuff we always have done. And we've had a surfer of, we've had a surfer of content for so long, 50 channels go to a bookshop.
All the books you can read on Amazon, Spotify. And yet we do filter, we talk to each other and we filter and we find ways to find the good
[00:26:35] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, maybe
that's the
[00:26:37] Jamie Marsland: changes. Yeah. I.
[00:26:38] Nathan Wrigley: the real world interactions and the suggestions from friends and what have you. by the way, I still want that cat and dinosaur video, so if you just whip that up, that would be.
[00:26:46] Jamie Marsland: the
[00:26:47] Nathan Wrigley: that would be good. Just despite the fact you don't think it, I want it really badly.
can, we move on then? So that was all about content and it felt like we dwelled upon writing. So words on a screen and what have you, but
[00:26:58] Jamie Marsland: I think you just to summarize that you agree with me now, I think on that you've changed your
[00:27:02] Nathan Wrigley: no, not at all. But I'm
[00:27:04] Jamie Marsland: Fully on board with my viewpoint. That's what we should have a scoreboard. One
[00:27:08] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, thanks. Okay, I'll take that. Yeah, I'll take the win any day. you never specify who'd won. I'll tell you what we'll do at the end of this episode. Run it through an AI and give it a scoring metric. See you wins.
[00:27:25] Jamie Marsland: on that note, quickly, I came up with a brilliant idea for an app, which if anyone wants to send me some VC money 'cause it, and the idea of the app is that, I dunno if I told you about this one, but I think it's genius that you log every argument that you have with your partner and then you get, the, then you get the, wisdom of the crowd to vote on who won it.
[00:27:46] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, this is, I think you should buy divorce.com. no. It's, a great,
[00:27:55] Jamie Marsland: Like
[00:27:55] Nathan Wrigley: the,
[00:27:56] Jamie Marsland: I loaded the dishwasher slightly wrong
[00:27:58] Nathan Wrigley: the problem is your wife also has exactly the same intuitions. I've often wanted that di have you ever wanted that sort of thing that you would attach somewhere to your clothing, which records?
Because as a, moral certainty that the thing that you said was what you said. and then you get into a room of people who heard what you said and they say back to you, no, you did not say that. You said the exact opposite. And you think, oh, how did my brain get that so wrong?
[00:28:28] Jamie Marsland: Well, funny you should say that 'cause I've got a quite a few doctor friends and there's a thing that's, they're trying to bring in at the moment with healthcare, which is called ambient ai, I think it is. And basically it listens to all the conversations that doctors have with their patients and it writes up all their notes automatically for them.
that's, that's a good use
[00:28:47] Nathan Wrigley: It is a good use case until you find out that the, that some venture capitalist has massive stakes in, and you think actually their, politics is slightly different to mine and what have you. It no. No, that's not a good use case. I'm immediate if I knew that I want that written in big red letters on the door when I go in to the doctors, because I want to say to the doctor, no, I'm gonna talk to you, and if you just pick up that pen when I leave, you could just summarize it in a few moments, couldn't you?
[00:29:17] Jamie Marsland: well that, yeah, but that's easy to say. But it's never happened. I dunno if you saw the, no, we need to move on.
[00:29:22] Nathan Wrigley: no. God, I'm
loving
[00:29:23] Jamie Marsland: I was gonna say, I dunno if you saw the 'cause it is on a similar note. There was the, I dunno if you saw the ring. I think it might be in a Super Bowl ad that got pared yesterday.
[00:29:32] Nathan Wrigley: how, how much of a pr snafu did that look like, like it was presented? So the,
[00:29:40] Jamie Marsland: it's very Orwellian.
[00:29:41] Nathan Wrigley: correctly, what they were basically saying is, we've got this product which will spy on your entire street, but if you lose your dog, isn't it great that we're spying on your entire street?
That's so great and everybody else thinks, wait. You are spying on our entire street. That's such a profound misunderstanding
[00:30:02] Jamie Marsland: no, nobody in the, product marketing team went, hold on. This, there's a, that might raise alarm bells.
We
[00:30:09] Nathan Wrigley: Did you, also see though, this is sort of straying into some other area, but did you also see that the, US law enforcement was recent? I, can't remember the context of this, but they were able to get something out of one of the doorbell cameras, and yet the camera had been set up to not record.
I can't remember if it was ring or something. We should probably look back at that. But there was a, there was the, person whose data was ex exfiltrated from that by law enforcement, had got it set up to do the exact opposite of what it was doing. And so there was this sort of intuition that, oh, maybe these, doorbell cameras are capturing information even when they're set to not capture information.
Right, right. Moving
[00:30:51] Jamie Marsland: Yeah.
[00:30:52] Nathan Wrigley: so that was all about written word and okay, we'll go with one nil. to
[00:30:58] Jamie Marsland: you.
[00:31:02] Nathan Wrigley: smiling.
[00:31:03] Jamie Marsland: everyone. Can be the judges judge of
[00:31:04] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. But let's move on to like pixels on a page and let's move into the sort of like the more the website and the look and feel and all of that kind of stuff. Did you get the same intuition from this recent Claude thing that you looked at in the last week? Same sort of, warm and fuzzy feeling that it was gonna be able to not just write content, but it was gonna be able to make credible websites.
[00:31:22] Jamie Marsland: Yes, for the first time it felt like this is comparable. 'cause I've been using a lot of vibe coding tools over the last year or year and a half. Like lovable and rep and bolt
[00:31:33] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, you've been through them all right. You've really
[00:31:35] Jamie Marsland: lot of them. Yeah. yeah. And curs. For different use cases, really. And it was the first moment when I felt, oh, this is actually, yeah, this is on a par.
This is, comparable. we're gonna be, WordPress is gonna be, which I felt for a while because as the models, are getting so good that actually they don't, they can understand the whole stack. And once they do that, then. Word WordPress has lagged behind because it has, more complexity.
it is dealing with blocks and it's dealing with WordPress and it's dealing with legacy. Whereas these other tools are just spurting out kind of HTML, and so it's struggled to, it's not so easy to do in WordPress. It's more complex, whereas now it feels like the models have got so good. They understand WordPress and understand the block editor.
And they can, We're there. So the baseline is, it was the first moment where I felt, oh, we're, gonna be okay in terms of the front end design experience is joyous.
[00:32:32] Nathan Wrigley: So it was able to like hook into almost everything that WordPress has to offer. So the di the, variety of core blocks and things like that.
[00:32:42] Jamie Marsland: kinda, yeah. Ki it was, there was some, there's some rough edges, but As a one shot experience. it was genuinely quite exciting,
[00:32:53] Nathan Wrigley: Okay.
[00:32:53] Jamie Marsland: moment of this is amazing. And I told it to think to add pages, change my menu and stuff like that. And it was it was doing
[00:33:00] Nathan Wrigley: Able to do all those kind of things. So it had not just context about the content that you created, but context about like where the menus are and how to create pages and delete users and publish things at certain
[00:33:11] Jamie Marsland: there are
[00:33:12] Nathan Wrigley: and things
[00:33:13] Jamie Marsland: with the, yeah, with the specific application, the WordPress application, it's that they thro, we've I should say, we've throttled it to certain things, so it can't do everything at the moment, but that's there's no reason. There's no certain reason why it can't, that's just.
A rollout plan.
[00:33:26] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.
[00:33:28] Jamie Marsland: but the main difference for me is like, it understands the entire context of your website. And once it understands that, then WordPress becomes the source of truth, which is cool. And then it's like we can do many, creative things with it. improve your website, get better traffic, all that kind of stuff, which I haven't seen, I've seen different solutions to like bits of it, like building the site.
wordpress.com has an AI site builder. Elementor has a site builder, sip WP and then some other tools. But this understanding the entire entirety of your website just takes it to a
[00:34:02] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Do you, so just, dwelling on your, amazing growth in the sort of, the WordPress YouTube space. So you've got your own channel and obviously the. The WordPress YouTube channel, but you've spent a long time creating content and being very successful at that, and your subscriber account just kept going up and up and up Do you worry that endeavors like this over time will erode that, that the need for curiosity and the need to watch videos, the likes of which you produce, or is it just gonna be more and more content around how to do stuff with AI as opposed to here's a video on how to create a custom post type.
[00:34:40] Jamie Marsland: yeah. It's gonna move from the plumbing to the more, I'm gonna say more exciting, creative stuff as I'm being a bit reductive. But yeah, we won't have to teach people how to. Add a Collins block and size it and, here's a bit snippet of css. I think those days are, those days have gone,
[00:34:58] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Already gone in the back, in the rear view mirror.
[00:35:01] Jamie Marsland: Do you know, it's funny, I had this very controversial, post controversial expost that I was gonna post last year, and I didn't post it. And I found it the other day in my draft and it was like, it was like, if you think, I didn't post this, but I'm saying it, so is that's probably worse.
But the, post
[00:35:17] Nathan Wrigley: whole load of caveats around what you're about to say. Jamie did not say what he's about to say. There
[00:35:23] Jamie Marsland: In no way did I say this. It's a good way of saying stuff that you said. I, was,
[00:35:29] Nathan Wrigley: I never
[00:35:30] Jamie Marsland: or a, top develop, A top developer of mine said this. You won't believe it. Actually, I'll say that.
[00:35:37] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Yeah.
[00:35:40] Jamie Marsland: Co-signed, co-signed with Nick Diego. I couldn't believe it.
I wouldn't let them publish it. And this is what they said. They said. If you think you're gonna be paid for writing CSS in a year's time, you're out of your mind. Or two years time, I didn't post, I didn't post it. 'cause I told them, no, guys, that's rage bait. but now I'm like, of course if you are fiddling around with CSS, sorry, that's not where, that's not what, people aren't gonna be paying for those skills on a
[00:36:10] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so, so that then leads me down this, path, which is to say that if the, like in a scenario, let's, take the example of Squarespace, right? So it's a SaaS platform. You log in, you pay your monthly fee, and the, whole intent of that is to get in, have no understanding of H-T-M-L-C ss, JavaScript, anything, just you point click, drag publish and you're off.
But the, edifice of WordPress is built on this obviously different foundation community. People over two decades sort of getting involved and working out how to do the CSS and the HTML and create the platform. Where do we stand if, there's, if all of those sort of foundational bits, which made the community, if they're not really required anymore, are we gonna go to a Word camp in the near future and there'll be like seven people there, all of whom are just making ai, doing everything with ai and, if that's the case.
Is that kind of like, I, can't remember the correct, expression here, but biting your nose to spite your face or something along those lines. Are we undermining the future of the open source project by rushing headlong into something, which it feels to me is gonna slowly but surely wick away the community that we've built so many years, so that we've spent so many years creating
[00:37:26] Jamie Marsland: Well, I think, there's a pushback on a few things. I don't think everyone that goes to Word Camps is writing CSS. there's a lot of business tracks where people are trying to make money out of WordPress. So, and the other thing is. We do have a demographic issue with word camps. We do need some slightly younger people to come along, and I think, we're not, we, what's difficult at the moment is that we can't really, see what's over the hill.
Like we can, just assume that this kind of reductive AI's gonna take everything. I think it's, I think there's so much, there's so much opportunity to fill. Like you look at most websites, they're not brilliant. Strategically not particularly being used to grow their businesses. so I think, and there's all sorts of incredibly creative, like just two hours I've, thought of like 10 incredible use cases to that would grow a business.
So I think there's gonna be all sorts of new fantastic things, I hope anyway. New fantastic things that we, can't imagine yet in terms of what people are gonna be strateg strategically being able to do with ai. and all sorts of, we were talking before this started around, if you're a publisher, how are you gonna integrate this into your publishing workflow?
If you've got teams of people, how are you gonna integrate this? all sorts of new interfaces are gonna be, have to be imagined. so I I don't, it's gonna be, it's definitely gonna be disruptive. What, it ends up like, I don't know. But there's no, I don't think you can, you can't say, let's not go this route because.
Yeah, we want people to be hand scaffolding sites with HML and CSS 'cause I don't think that's, not tenable for WordPress. That's not the way the world's gonna, people aren't gonna pay for
[00:39:14] Nathan Wrigley: No, it's very curious. I, honestly, I have such, I really genuinely do. So I know I was pretending to be the atta, the protagonist earlier. I do have a lot of mixed feelings around this. So this is me authentically speaking. I, I have. I, have great excitement because technology, since I was a young child, has been really interesting to me.
whenever a new piece of technology came out, I'd be fascinated, take it apart, have a look, see how it works, make sure that I could break it and then fix it. That kind of stuff. this just seems to be on a very different level, and I, think the bit is that it's inside this box that I don't really understand.
So when WordPress came along, I could look at all the files. And I could see how okay, that thing follows from this thing. And there's this whole hierarchy of things which happen. And here's the scaffolding and how, here's how it works, and here's the cascade of what happens when I click publish. I could get all of that with this.
It, to me, it's just a black hole. I don't really know what the heck's going on inside of it. and because I don't really know what's going on inside of it, the sort of control freak of inside of me is a bit concerned that things might just get away from us. And I think there's, an important. There's an important position for people to occupy there. I think if we all just go for the non domer approach and we're just AI pros, that's not healthy. I think we do need doomers amongst us to sort of say, maybe we should put the brakes on over here because things could get a little bit outta hand here and people to watch the economy more broadly and say, do you know what?
We lost a million people to AI last year. Let's have a think about that. See if that's actually healthy for the wider society. So I hope you understand what I'm saying there. So although I was like,
[00:40:53] Jamie Marsland: Yeah, it was a it,
[00:40:54] Nathan Wrigley: your arguments, there is a bit of me, which is excited, but there's also a bit of me which says, wait, let's have a think.
[00:41:00] Jamie Marsland: yeah. But I think the only way you can do that is to, probably some kind of author authoritarian state and, I'm not sure I want you running. That state and telling us? I'm not
[00:41:14] Nathan Wrigley: You're in luck There.
[00:41:16] Jamie Marsland: I'm not sure. I think my point is I'm not sure you can, control it and stop it. I think we do have agency to, to mold it though, and
[00:41:25] Nathan Wrigley: No. You, see, I, think that argument is a bit fallacious because we've, stopped things in the past. Like, every nation on earth could have nuclear weapons at this point, but when they were invented, somebody turned around and said, you know what? This is really. There's a potential here for things to go horribly wrong, so let's make it so that all of the component parts, the knowledge in particular, let's put those in boxes and make sure that those boxes never get opened and let's make sure that the minerals that are needed to make this thing happen are monitored heavily and we are where we are.
So people stepped in, legislated made it so that it was difficult for that stuff to leak out. I think you can. but in, in the realm of just pure knowledge, it's very difficult to,
[00:42:10] Jamie Marsland: Yeah. And what are you gonna, are you gonna, like are you gonna, so your argument would be like, I could come up with some, I was, I dunno how I came across it the other day. It was like, how many people in the UK are harmed by, this is not a fun stat, but how many, by doctors mis prescribing medicines Right.
And it's many, and it's, extraordinary how many, people are harmed by doctors mis. So you're gonna sit there on the platform and say, I wanna harm, I'm willing to let these people be harmed because I wanna stop stuff. Or how many people die on the roads every year? Are you gonna say, I want, yeah, I'm happy with 30,000 people dying on the road, or, I'm, or I'm happy with our productivity levels being really, poor, or I'm happy with our education, as it is where we're getting, one in.
Two in five children in primary school coming out, not learning to read. does that, because that doesn't sound like a, that doesn't sound, hold on.
[00:43:03] Nathan Wrigley: Every.
[00:43:04] Jamie Marsland: Doesn't sound.
[00:43:05] Nathan Wrigley: That you just said, there's legislation around it. I can't prescribe medicine 'cause I'm not a doctor. I have to obey the speed limit. Because we know that if everybody goes at 150 miles an hour, we'll all be dead. So we legislated. We put laws in place that person can give medicine out 'cause they did a medical degree.
Those cars can only go at 70 miles an hour because we realize going at any speed we like is insane. That person's not allowed to teach because they don't have the qualifications to teach. We legislated around it. We made it
[00:43:36] Jamie Marsland: Well, we,
[00:43:37] Nathan Wrigley: Bun fight for everybody.
[00:43:38] Jamie Marsland: We do have, we do have legislation that's coming for AI.
[00:43:42] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, do we? Okay.
[00:43:44] Jamie Marsland: Yeah, the, eus, I think. Talking about that at the moment. So, certain states are, and I think the EU might, it might be the, digital backwater that you want to go and, live in eventually.
It sounds like they're your kind of people.
[00:44:03] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, when you say digital backwater in that, in in, that tone, I know that it's two nil Wrigley. Woohoo.
[00:44:10] Jamie Marsland: I think what you need is a man, I'm, in fact, I'm gonna write you a manifesto. Today.
[00:44:15] Nathan Wrigley: It's called the Luddites Manifesto.
[00:44:17] Jamie Marsland: Luddite bring back the Luddites. We're gonna go and break all the threshing machines.
[00:44:23] Nathan Wrigley: Let's end it there. I've enjoyed that and I hope that you, you took, I'm, sure you did. I'm watching your face the whole time you took it in the spirit in which it was offered. maybe it was two ne Maslin, maybe it was two ne Wrigley, one all, I don't know. leave us a comment and no who won. And, Jamie Marsland, thank you for debating with me today. Appreciate it.
[00:44:43] Jamie Marsland: Thank you, Nathan. That's great.
[00:44:47] Nathan Wrigley: That was the sound of Jamie falling over.
Okay, that's all we've got for you today. Thanks for listening to that. I hope that you recognise that Jamie did not win that debate. No, honestly, I've no idea what's gonna happen. I can only assume that the future will be full of AI and any curmudgeonly, luddite concerns that I have are going to be swept away in the near future, and our robot overlords will be telling us what to do before the decade is out. Let's hope not.
If you would like to comment on that episode, head to wpbuilds.com, search for episode number 462, and leave us a comment there. Both Jamie and I would really appreciate it.
Don't forget wpbuilds.com/subscribe, to keep in touch. wpbuilds.com/advertise, to find out more about messaging within the podcast.
And that's it for this week. I'm gonna fade in some dreadful, cheesy music no doubt made by AI, which is kind of ironic.
And I will be back next week with another instalment of the podcast. You stay safe. Have a good week. Bye-bye for now.
