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Unless you’ve been living in a cave, you’ve probably noticed how ChatGPT took the internet by storm, even leading to seismic shifts in the search engine landscape with Bing working on adding ChatGPT-like search to its search engine (and Google jumping on with Bard).
All that hype might have you wondering how you can use ChatGPT for WordPress. Or, maybe more importantly, if you should use ChatGPT for WordPress.
In this post, we’re going to try to answer those questions by covering the following:
- Some of the main ways in which ChatGPT and WordPress artificial intelligence can help your site
- The downsides/dangers of relying on artificial intelligence
- The best WordPress ChatGPT plugins (and WordPress AI plugins in general)
How Can ChatGPT and Artificial Intelligence Benefit WordPress?
To kick things off, let’s talk about some of the main ways in which tools like ChatGPT can help your WordPress site.
A lot of these relate to ChatGPT marketing benefits, but you can also use ChatGPT in other ways, such as helping you create a custom plugin for your site.
Craft Better Headlines to Engage Your Visitors
Writing the headline of a post can be one of the toughest parts of the whole process. But at the same time, the headline is incredibly important because it’s what convinces people to click/read the article.
With AI, you can quickly brainstorm multiple headline ideas and then pick the one that you think will perform the best.
You could even test the different headline suggestions against one another using a plugin like Title Experiments.
Write SEO Titles and Meta Descriptions
In addition to writing your post’s headline, AI can also help you create SEO titles and meta descriptions for your content.
The basic idea here is the same – you use AI to brainstorm a list of ideas and then you choose the one that you think will work the best.
You could even split-test different AI SEO titles using a tool like SEOTesting.com.
Write Drafts for Complete Blog Posts (That You Edit)
If you want to go further than headlines and SEO titles, ChatGPT and other large language models are also capable of writing full blog posts.
While we don’t advocate using AI to bulk-generate content on your WordPress site, AI can be a great time-saving tool to write the first draft of long-form content.
Once you have the draft, you can go in and manually improve, refine, and verify the text to make sure you’re publishing quality content.
Plugins like GPT AI Power let you use GPT-3 to generate full blog posts in a separate box in the WordPress editor. Then, you can paste some/all of the content into the actual text editor.
If you’re ok with working outside of WordPress, there are tons of AI writer tools powered by GPT-3, such as Jasper.
Research Topics More Quickly
In addition to helping you create content from scratch, artificial intelligence can also be a valuable research tool.
You can ask tools like ChatGPT to summarize topics or websites to help you more quickly grasp the main points.
If you want to access this type of ChatGPT research without leaving your WordPress dashboard, you can play around with tools like the ChatGPTforWP browser extension. While it’s not a plugin, it is built specifically for WordPress and lets you interact with ChatGPT from the Block Editor interface.
Translate Your Website Content
While much of the AI focus has been on large language models like GPT-3, it’s worth remembering that there are other ways that artificial intelligence can help your WordPress site.
For example, since 2016, Google Translate has used an AI-powered neural machine translation approach that performs translation by encoding the semantics of a sentence rather than just using phrase-to-phrase translation like older approaches.
With a plugin like TranslatePress, you can automatically translate your site’s content using Google Translate and then manually refine the translations as needed.
This is similar to the idea of using GPT-3 to write content – Google Translate can do a lot of the heavy lifting for you and then you just need to edit and refine.
If you want to automatically translate your WordPress site with Google Translate’s neural machine translation approach, we have step-by-step guides on how you can use the free TranslatePress plugin:
TranslatePress Multilingual
Create Your Own AI-Powered Chatbot
Another helpful application of WordPress artificial intelligence is to actually create your own chatbot, like ChatGPT.
You can use this chatbot to offer support, sell more effectively, or just generally to create a fun, engaging experience for your visitors.
There are tools and plugins that let you use similar language models to ChatGPT, but customized for your own website.
If you’re interested in this application, the AI Engine plugin from Jordy Meow is the most popular option. It lets you…
- Customize the tone/voice
- Tell the AI to act in a certain way
- Feed it your site’s content so that the AI model can discuss the current page
- Etc.
The developer even has a full guide on training the AI model for your site.
Add Alt Text to Images
Adding alt text to images is important for creating an accessible website and also localizing your site for visitors from different geographic areas.
However, manually adding alt text to images can be a chore. To fix this, you can use a WordPress AI plugin to automatically add relevant image alt text for you.
For example, if you post a picture of a yellow bird sitting on a branch, the AI tool would automatically add image alt text along the lines of “A yellow bird sitting on a branch”.
This application of WordPress AI has actually been around for a long time, long before ChatGPT and other similar models gained popularity.
I’ve personally used the Automatic Alternative Text plugin, which is based on Microsoft’s Cognitive Services Computer Vision API. While that plugin hasn’t been updated in years now, there seem to be plenty of other options including Image SEO, Alt Text AI, and others.
In general, these plugins work very well for images with real-life visuals. However, they don’t work well if you’re primarily using screenshots of website/software interfaces.
For example, if I were writing a tutorial on how to translate WordPress using DeepL, the plugin would not be able to automatically generate image alt text for the images in the setup instructions.
Create a Custom Plugin for Your Specific Use Case
In addition to creating text, another way in which WordPress users have been applying ChatGPT is to create the code for custom plugins.
Based on what I’ve seen, ChatGPT can actually be surprisingly adept at this. For example, Johnathan Williams had ChatGPT create several different WordPress plugins with good (but not perfect) results.
While ChatGPT probably isn’t able to create the next WooCommerce plugin (yet, at least), it can work well for small, feature-specific plugins.
Creating a ChatGPT WordPress plugin like this could allow you to quickly add small features and adjustments to your site without needing to use a third-party plugin that may or may not do what you need.
It can also help you eliminate bloat, because you can have ChatGPT code a plugin for your exact need, whereas plugin developers need to create more flexible plugins for the mass market.
However, ChatGPT still isn’t perfect here. So unless you have the development knowledge to review and adjust ChatGPT’s work, you probably won’t be able to benefit from this quite yet.
The Potential Downsides of Using Artificial Intelligence in WordPress
While there are a lot of ways in which a WordPress AI plugin can help your site, there are also some potential downsides that you’ll want to consider before you go all-out with using something like ChatGPT on your site.
AI Content Isn’t Always Right – But It’s Confident
One of the biggest issues with AI content right now is that it’s not perfect and it still makes lots of factual mistakes.
For example, take this Tweet from Miklos Zoltan where Bing’s ChatGPT tool made up facts about his company and even attributed quotes to Miklos that Miklos has never said.
While these inaccurate responses aren’t the norm, it’s very hard to tell when ChatGPT is providing false information because it still sounds so confident even when making stuff up. In fact, sometimes it seems like ChatGPT deserves to end up on the Reddit r/confidentlyincorrect subreddit.
Unless you have the subject matter expertise to review the content that a ChatGPT WordPress plugin generates (or the willingness to hire someone who does), you probably shouldn’t go all-in on using AI to generate long-form content.
We Don’t Know How Search Engines Will Treat AI Content Long Term
Because ChatGPT and other models are so new, we still don’t know the long-term effects of how Google is going to treat AI content (or even whether Google will be able to detect AI content at scale).
And oh yeah, I guess we should also include Bing as a search engine now, because it seems like some people might actually use it now that Bing has the OpenAI partnership.
If search engine optimization is an important part of your marketing strategy, you might want to see how things shake out before going all-in.
Google has clarified that it doesn’t think AI content is automatically bad. This Tweet thread from Danny Sullivan covers some AI SEO issues
The general idea is that using AI to assist your content creation efforts is ok if you’re still creating helpful, accurate, and unique content.
However, using AI to mass-generate content just to get more search clicks is still going to get you on Google’s naughty list.
It might work for a while – and plenty of people are successfully gaming Google with AI content right now. But as a long-term strategy, it’s probably not a good idea to rely on long-form AI content, unless you’re heavily editing it.
Three WordPress AI Plugins to Experiment With AI
If you’re sold on the idea of using ChatGPT and/or artificial intelligence to benefit your WordPress site(s), your next question might be whether you can find any ChatGPT WordPress plugins to help you more easily implement these tactics.
We mentioned a few of these plugins above, but we’ll quickly recap some of the top options in this section.
But first – it’s also worth pointing out that you don’t necessarily need a ChatGPT WordPress plugin to benefit from GPT and AI in general. Instead, you can just use the AI tool’s interface and manually add the content to WordPress.
This might even be a good idea because it forces you to manually review all the content that you’re adding to your site.
AI Engine
AI Engine is sort of like a playground for all things WordPress artificial intelligence.
One of its most fleshed-out features is the ability to create and train your own content-aware AI chatbot, as we mentioned earlier.
But it can also help you implement WordPress AI in other ways:
- Generate suggestions for headlines and excerpts
- Write WooCommerce product descriptions
- Write complete articles
- Generate images using DALL-E
All of these tools are powered by the OpenAI API.
GPT AI Power
GPT AI Power is another popular WordPress AI plugin that helps you integrate GPT-3 AI content into a ton of different areas of your site.
Like AI Engine, GPT AI Power is also based on OpenAI’s tools and offers the following:
- Title/headline suggestion tool
- Bulk automatic content writer
- Image generator (via DALL-E and Stable Diffusion)
- WooCommerce product writer
- GPT-based web forms
- Chatbot tool to offer an AI-powered chatbot on your site.
It also includes a database of prompts that you can use.
ChatGPTForWP
ChatGPTForWP is not a ChatGPT WordPress plugin per se. Instead, it’s a web browser extension that lets you access ChatGPT from inside your WordPress dashboard and otherwise integrate it with your site.
With the extension installed, you’ll be able to access ChatGPT from a sidebar in the WordPress editor. Note – it only works with the WordPress block editor (Gutenberg) – it does not work if you’re still using the classic TinyMCE editor.
The extension is available for Chrome and Firefox.
It’s free for two basic prompts, but $9 per month for access to all of the prompts.
Artificial Intelligence for WordPress: What Do You Think?
That wraps up our thoughts on how ChatGPT and artificial intelligence can help WordPress site owners…as well as a few of the pitfalls to avoid.
Overall, at least in its current iteration, you should probably use AI as a tool to help you create content on your WordPress site, rather than a complete solution in itself.
It can help you improve your headlines/SEO titles, write drafts of entire blog posts, chat with your visitors, translate your website’s content, and more.
TranslatePress Multilingual
Now it’s over to you – how do you plan to use AI to help your WordPress sites? Or will you be giving it a pass for now? Let us know in the comments!