Hello and welcome everyone back to another episode of the Publisher Lab
And I'm Tyler Bishop as always. And you might notice if you're watching this, which in incidence watch now, standing right
next to me is The Terminator. So welcome Terminator back to the show or I guess for the first time
Well no, actually we had The Terminator over here because we've had him in our building for a while
And I borrowed him this morning for a webinar that we did
But he actually is not going to be joining us today. It is who you've known to expect on our podcast
Whitney Wright, welcome back. Hi, good to be back. Did you get worried that you were going to be replaced by The Terminator
I'm sure a lot of people kind of wonder that right now, huh? Yeah
You know, for me there, I think probably has a little bit more flair than I do
But I don't know about his knowledge on digital publishing. Well, you know, I bet it could increase quickly, but not necessarily known for the charm The Terminators
Have you seen all The Terminator movies? And I just mean like the good ones, not like all the most recent ones, which I'm sure there's
too many of. I've seen zero. So I know nothing about that. You've seen zero Terminator movies? Yeah. Movies
We're going to have to cut this. Otherwise you're going to lose credibility
I know. I'm sure you're going to lose credibility. Believe me. It should definitely work the opposite way
The person who watched the most Terminator movies should lose some form of credibility
I think. But the first two were great. But speaking of robots and Terminators, we're probably a little ways away from Terminators
but what's going on in the world of publishing and what's come to be known as kind of the
world of AI these days, huh? Yeah. I mean, our topic today, you know, mostly focused on AI because it seems like every
week someone's doing something with AI. You know, I saw Photoshop. You know, I saw an article on their AI, which I can't remember what it's called
Yeah, I don't know what it's called, but I think they talked about it
If people haven't seen the demo, it's incredible. It's actually software. It's really cool
What they stripped ends up being remotely close to what they showed in the demo
It's amazing because I think everybody was saying for a long time, like, what if, you
know, things like Photoshop and all these different design tools, they're going to go
out of business. AI can just generate everything. And then all of a sudden you see that demo and you go, well, maybe, well, who would use
anything else now? Like, they're going to be in business. They just light speeded ahead of everyone else
So I think it's a good lesson there, at least in terms of jumping to conclusions about who
or what will be made irrelevant because I think Photoshop, wow, that demo is pretty incredible
Yeah, definitely. So for our topics today, we have WordPress has a new AI content generator and then OpenAI
has put a pause on CCC5. And lastly, most SEOs are not being impressed with the new Google search generative experience
So pretty much all focused on AI. It's hard to find anything into the publishing that's not kind of talking about it
Every once in a while, you know, you get a little bit of tidbit from Google that's not
focused on AI or, you know, something else. But it's I just there's just nothing else that people are talking about, which, you
know, is the hot topic. It's just talking about. Yeah, it would be as if we had a podcast, which is funny enough
Let me get my example in a minute. It'd be as if we had a podcast on printing magazines and newspapers right as the Internet
was starting to happen. And just ignore the topic of the Internet
So I think on our podcast radio station, I suppose, would be the equivalent back then
So yeah, I think we're going to just see a lot of it because to talk about this about
anything else or without the context of AI, I think would make the show less relevant. Yeah
And you just actually did a webinar this morning on digital publishing and that will be available
on YouTube later once we get it edited and uploaded. So make sure keep an eye out for that
Covered a lot of important topics and basically how if you're not trying to use AI and you're
going to be left behind. Yeah, it's something you want to get into more. I know I give my opinions and we talk about things a lot on this show, but I wanted to
try to break down sort of where I think the publisher system is and why I think it's an opportunity
And so kind of giving a few examples and yeah, I actually give a giant list of things that
I think publishers should be doing. And then do not fear because I'm going to try to help show publishers all of that over
the course of the next year, hopefully. And yeah, I mean, me personally, I'm very excited about everything that's going on
Now, some things are less exciting than others and some things I think are lame
I think you're getting ready to talk about WordPress. So I'll stop there and just very appropriate, I think, segue. Yes
So we will talk about WordPress, how it has an AI content generator
And I think we'll see a lot of this new plugins with AI
So Jetpack has released a new WordPress plugin that integrates AI directly into the WordPress editor
It enables content generation within the publishing workflow. It's called Jetpack AI Assistant and it serves as a writing assistant, a conversational user interface
Users can interact with the AI system with just writing prompts. There's additional features
If I go back to writing poems, a lot of you can select different writing styles
And I think the premium version is $20 a month. But there's a free version
I guess I don't really know. I haven't looked completely into it. I guess I don't know
Like, how much better is this than just using that GDG thing
You know better, of course. Yeah, exactly. I'm kind of curious. I guess one of the reasons why I wanted to bring this up is that we're going to see a
lot of this. I don't want publishers to be taken advantage of. And the fact that they're trying to integrate AI and they're like, now trying to, you know
$20 here, $20 there, trying to use all these plugins and stuff when there's a free tool
online and it's better. Yeah. So, I mean, first of all, I guess partially setGDG isn't totally free
You know, I use setGDG for a lot and it has paid the plugins and beta
They're immensely helpful and beneficial, but they, the cost of using using GDG4, it's
actually kind of expensive. It'll get cheaper, but very quickly in the same way that cell phone things
And then it used to be a thing and you would run on the bill calling too many people, especially
when you were roaming or something. But I think, you know, when I see the WordPress thing, if the Jetpack thing is free, I think
I saw it this morning, logging into a WordPress admin dashboard. It's going to be a lot like a lot of these other writer tools that are out there where
you're kind of like, okay, cool. Like you basically put a interface around a prompt that says like, write an article
blah, blah, blah. And then let me fill in what I want them to write an article about
It's like, I could very much just write the rest of that prompt myself and not pay for
your software that just, yeah, it's basically just like a decorative layer over the top
of chat GPT or worse, something that's not chat GPT that's cheaper and worse
But to me, you know, like I would use the tool that I think is the best for this kind
of stuff. So one of the things that we've learned, we've been using AI to generate and write articles
in a bunch of different ways. And overwhelmingly, like chat GPT four is kind of like, it does a better job
And when you're talking about writing on your website, like to be honest, like you, I don't
think I want an assistant from the standpoint of something to like, write as I go, like
writing over the top of me or like generating a paragraph and then I edit it or something
I think that's a bad waste of time. I think you're basically writing an article and like, yeah, I don't think you're letting
AI do what it can help you do to scale. So I think you want something that's good enough that it can write the whole article
and you can publish it and feel good about it and then go back and augment it or edit it
If you know, the article is actually going to get some traction if people actually want to read it
This is a great opportunity for people to not just do keyword research, but put the
content out there. If people want it, I mean, how much time have we spent writing content that nobody wants
to read? Oh my God. So like, let's just make all the content and then go and make it better for his interest
You can find out. This is the best thing ever for publishers. Have you seen any other? Yeah
Have you seen any other tools like this that are coming out or plugins that you kind of
like, probably not waste your time. Publishers just kind of like, you know, be a little cautious and getting involved in
many of these plugins. Well, first of all, I think this, the idea of like, you know, an AI content generator
plugin for WordPress, like Jetpack adding to it. This is an innovation is putting a CD player in a, in a call and CD player same long and
taking them out to pay text. So it's a, it's a temporary bridge in a lot of ways
But you know, realistically, this is one area right now where I wouldn't, I wouldn't express
much caution. I would say, you know, be weary of promises and you know, save your money
But at the same time, like this is the time to try things
You know, I'm cautious about like, you know, telling you that the Jetpack plugin is not
so great because realistically you need to be trying it out. But I think you put it really well in the beginning, whenever you said like, you know
don't get fooled into things you're using AI whenever it's doing the 10% of, you know
you know, it's helping you with maybe 10% of what you do. It should be like doing 90% of your workflow and then you should be doing 10% and you should
be making progress a hundred times faster in a year or two
Totally agree. So still on, yeah. So still on, yeah
So you're talking about GPP4. They are not training GPP5 yet. This is an article from Tech Front
And so the CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman, stated they have a lot of work to do before they're
starting the new GPP5 model and new ideas for it. And a lot of this is concerns by the industry
We've talked about this before. There's 1,100 signatures from people in the industry that do en masse
And they call for a pause in training AI systems more powerful than GPP4
And Altman clarified that OpenAI had not started training GPP5 and had no plan to do so for
some time. And they're addressing concerns through measures like a signal audit, spread screening, safety tests
And Altman emphasized that OpenAI supports self-regulation with a guest-regulating smart AI startup
And he's working with lawmakers. So I guess I wanted to know what your opinion is
Do you think that this is genuine? Or is Altman praying nicely because he doesn't want to be shut down
I mean, I don't think anything is altruistic. I don't think you can assume that at all
And when you're talking about a business that makes money, even something that's like OpenAI
I don't want to get into the whole story there. But even if something is a nonprofit, et cetera, people are people
And no one is completely not self-serving. And in many cases, you're playing the battle of public opinion against lawmakers and legislators
and things like that. So is this completely an altruistic, genuine effort
Probably not. Almost certainly not. Sam strikes me as – and I've heard him talk in long form several times – he strikes
me as someone not like myself, but similar in that I remember telling people a long time
ago I can't be a CEO, especially of a large business, because I'm an idealist and I'm
an artist. Which means at some point, I'm going to make decisions based on sort of my view of how
something should be and trying to fit everything else backwards into something that I think
is right or just or whatever. That doesn't make it right or just
It just means that I have a vision that I would like to fulfill
And that's not in the best interest of shareholders long term. However, if you are Sam Altman, you are somebody that maybe has that view, in which case, if
anybody has a slightly different view and it has a strong impact on our future, then
that's concerning. And so I take everything that he says very lightly, because I do find him to be somebody
that is a bit of an idealist. And so I try to look more so at what they're doing
And I would imagine that GPT-5, quote unquote, training isn't underway, because using the
existing parameters and methods that they use for GPT-4, I actually don't think you're
not going to see a significant jump from a 4 to a 5
And the reason is because a lot of that GPT is a little bit of a smoke and mirrors
It's great at communicating, but the underlying mechanisms and machine learning there are
maybe not quite as impressive as I think people might assume. Well, I know that there was a big difference from GPT-3 to GPT-4
I haven't played around with the two to really know much of the difference between, but you
said you've been working with GPT-4. What would you say are the greatest improvements from GPT-3
It's more accurate, has better syntax and semantic understanding. So you'll notice that it provides, you can get more of an accurate answer from less of
a prompt. So GPT-3, you might ask it something or want it to do something, and you might have to
basically keep adding to your question four or five times before you've told it, like
oh, well, I want this written, but you wrote it stupid, so don't write it like this
And then you just have to keep adding constraints. It does a much better job now of sort of understanding what you mean, you personally, and as the
track goes on, it learns from you much faster. So I think that's a huge benefit there
The other side of that is that the plugins make a huge difference because you're able
to add in external sort of tools and features and tricks that it can leverage
So like, it can go out and get fresh information from a website or a link
I think that that's a huge advantage as well. But I think that that's where five is probably going to emphasize its innovation, which is
doing a better job of leveraging agents and plugins and things like that
So it can actually do things more than just provide you text-to-fact
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So next on the docket, we have a survey that was run by Lily Ray, the senior director of
SEO and head of organic research at Amstiv Digital. It says, most SEOs are not feeling flushed with the new Google search generative experience
This is from Search Engine Roundtable. So the new Google search generative experience of CE, which I will not try to say that by
myself, has started rolling out to some users. I've played around with it
It's been mostly helpful for me. Many SEOs, though, are not impressed with it compared to traditional Google search
And like I said, Lily Ray, she conducted a poll on Twitter and out of 800 votes, 12
considered CE a significant improvement while 37% believed it is not an improvement
The majority 51% responded with meh, indicating a discord or indifferent response
What's been your experience with it? So, I mean, SEOs are the last person who I would go to for an opinion on whether or not
something is good or helpful for the users. SEOs have largely ruined a lot of content over the years
But that's partly Google's fault. Google search generative experience, I think it kind of sucks
It's not bad. So I will say it is helpful. It adds features and benefits to search that I think are good
The thing is, is that a search engine is not like if Google tries to balance what I need
from an AI experience or an agent-based AI experience with a search engine
it's going to lose a lot of people because I think, in my opinion
I want a search engine sometimes. I want a list of websites. I want a list of resources that I can go to for something and I don't want something else
to make that decision for me. However, sometimes I want information or I need something done or I need to know how to do something
I need something that's multifaceted. I'm searching for, you know, like how do I measure a couch and figure out if it's going to be
too big for a room or something. I don't know. It's a bad example
So I don't want to list a website for that. I actually just want to kind of toss in my dimensions and have something figure this all out for me
I don't, search engine never is going to be the right tool for that job, but AI is
However, on the other hand, if I want to look around for where can I buy a couch near me
you know, I don't really want a chatbot to give me a list of places. I want to kind of go look at what places are available and I'll decide which ones maybe are worth
you know, looking at or clicking on. So I think just fundamentally it's something that is kind of maybe a bridge into something that's going to be better
But I do think that it's helpful and good. I think SEOs are the wrong people to ask
SEOs are going to hate everything that Google is going to change and do over the next year
I have a feeling. That is one prediction that I will make that I'll happily eat my hat if I'm wrong about
Is that a thing, eat my hat? I think it is. I mean, I've heard a couple of people say it recently
I've never heard it before, but I figured I'd try it out on the pod
Okay, I believe you. I would eat my hat. I would eat my hat. I won't eat mine
So I've played around with it a little bit too and I would, I didn't vote on the Twitter poll
but if I did, I would also click meh. Thanks for staying objective
Yeah, I think that like you said, for some things, when I just want an answer, it's been very helpful
But I still find myself clicking on websites anyway, because I usually want more information than it's given me
What was I looking up the other day? I was looking up something and it kept generating answers and like, this is not giving me what I want
I'm like, I got to go searching on websites and I found something there within like two searchable websites or something like that
So it is an experimental mode. I believe I saw something that the experiment will end at the end of the year
So I know that some people have been tweeting, you know, various members of Google
Drone, you're giving their little tidbits on what they think. And apparently they have responded
Some people have responded from Google, you know, like, thanks for the advice. So I don't know if they're actually taking into consideration what people are saying, but they are responding
So if you hate or love something about it, it's worth reaching out and being like a tidbit of grizzly pond
And I think that they will, they're going to be working on it all year
I don't know. I haven't seen anything. Have you seen anything about it becoming like worldwide
I mean, this is an experiment. Have you seen anything about we're going to roll it out after this experiment on the state
No, no. It's kind of broadly given ranges. And usually whenever in my experience, I've dealt with Google a lot on this kind of stuff
both behind the scenes and then just over time. And usually when you get something broad like that, it's it they might push it a year
I doubt they do. But I think it's definitely not going to be sooner than what they said
It rarely is. I've been thinking of cookies, you know, they're like, they're particularly long
Yeah, we keep pushing out part of that, I think, was, you know, can demonstrate things weird
But yeah, I I think that people if you can get on the wait list to try it
I got on the wait list and I think the next day I received access. So if you want to play around with it, see what the Google is working on
what search can look like, you know, in the next year or two. I think it's worth looking at. But as we said before, it's nothing's going to be changing overnight
So, you know, I don't know. Because user behavior doesn't change. User behavior doesn't change overnight
You know, and I think that's something that my colleague John Cole brought up recently that I thought was really adept
And that you mentioned it earlier, like you find yourself still looking for a list of websites sometimes
Yeah. And I mean, I think part of that is, you know
I've seen a couple of articles where it's like open AI version of AI generated search and response is better still
And so I think part of this is that Google hasn't quite caught up yet to where Microsoft and OpenAI is
Not that they won't. You know, it is Google. But I've seen a couple of articles that are like Microsoft AI and OpenAI is still better
I think the line in the sand that I've been able to draw, and I've yet to find too many flaws
which there's always edge cases, but I think we need to really define
I mean, we need being other people on the space, the platform, if you're a search engine
you're a great tool when I don't know exactly what I'm looking for or I'm looking for something
and I need to know what's available to look at. Or like I need access to the resources that are available
I don't know something and I'm truly searching. But when I know something or I know what I'm looking for, I don't really, a search engine becomes my enemy
It becomes this thing that I have to figure out, like I have to do all the work myself
and I have to use something that's not really looking for my answers
or looking for the thing that I know I'm looking for. It's trying to give me what it thinks might provide that answer
which is less good than an AI. I was putting together a presentation, I found it, man
AI can really speed up the time it takes to make a great presentation. Not just because you want to make slides, but to tell a story
I used Maps as an example and I wanted, not only that I want charts
I wanted sort of like the history and I wanted to be able to know the facts of basically 2000 till now
the state of the music industry and the transitions to streaming. And it did all the research with the plugins in TabGPT4
it went out and got the most relevant, well-cited charts and graphs to support my case
And it took like one minute and I've definitely spent hours on that kind of stuff in the past
to make sure that I'm factually accurate and know what I'm talking about. And so something like that is just
I would think about that from a content creation standpoint for sure. Because I mean, man, like knowing the information is like the important part
Yeah, I think you made a good point there was that it was factually accurate
I think, you know, people need to be careful when you're doing that stuff. And such as sources type off an article where a lawyer had used AI to like pull court cases as examples for his case
And AI had made up for court cases. And to prove his point, you know, and because it wanted to fulfill his request
So always be careful with AI, you know, they do give hallucinations
But like you said, I think AI is just the phrase that I would use for AI content creation
that's the publishing is work smarter, not harder. And AI is absolutely the way to do that
Yeah, was there anything else that you want to discuss that you want to talk about
I don't think so. I think we have a question from last week from one of our listeners
Yeah. So is there anything else that we, you know, most you've talked about AI a lot today
You did this webinar earlier and now you're talking about it again. So we did have a question from YouTube comments. I think this was a couple of podcasts ago
It's from Stuart 6359. So it's that you had asked, let's say I wanted to make my WordPress site available in Markdown
so that it is more accessible for chatbots to go on in the future. Where would I even start
Yeah, so it's a good question. So you mentioned it's a WordPress site
This makes it really easy. So I do think that WordPress is going to be something that everybody will want to get out of eventually
I mean, this sort of lays the framework to where it's like you're going to get a nice picture in this project
of how you can get rid of WordPress eventually and make your life a lot easier and better
And I think you start by, if you're not familiar with the WordPress has a REST API
I wish I could just, I used to know right off the top of my head the URL parameters
So it's yoursite.com, your WordPress site, and then it's slash, I think it's wp-rest or wp-json
and then it's slash v2. Anyway, just search WordPress REST API URL and you'll find it
But what you'll want to do is the first two parts of the slug will be like wp-json and they'll be like a v2
And then what you want is the end of the slug to end with post
So you'll see that out there a lot. There's different types of URLs for different types of what they call like requests
So what you're going to do is you're going to enter that URL into your browser
And before you do, I want you to download the JSON Reader Chrome extension
And this will just make this, whenever you type in that URL and you hit enter
it's going to make it a lot more readable and just sort of like understandable in this example
So when you put that in there, first you should be shocked because I would bet that 90, maybe 99%
but I'll be like friendly here and say 95% of WordPress users have no idea that by default
most of your WordPress websites have your content completely available to be stolen, moved, taken, whatever
through the WordPress REST API which is enabled by default without any form of security
So I actually think that that's kind of a good thing in a couple ways, but I also think that if you ever wondered why somebody was able to steal all your content and put it someplace else
it sure does make it really easy. So first of all, when you put that URL in and you use that Chrome extension
you're going to return a massive page that looks a little bit like code
but it'll be very readable because it'll be every single custom field and field by default inside of WordPress
So author, date published, date modified, title, title tags, description, image header URL
all that kind of stuff will be in there along with your content itself. And then what you can do with that is you can take that out and you can basically just download that using the JSON reader plugin
or the Chrome extension and then there's a ton of free tools out there
There's a billion ways to do it, but if you just search convert JSON to markdown
you'll find a free converter and you can convert either a portion of that file for, you know
testing or all of it and then you'll have this markdown document which it'll look a lot more like a Word document
except you're going to have like little hashtags and stuff like that in front of some of the fields
So it'll be like, you know, author.bash, you know, and then the author's name for the respective post
And then there's a lot of markdown editors out there. There's some that are based on the web so if you search free markdown, you know, writer or something like that
there's free tools you can get right in your web browser. I know on Mac there's a really popular app called Ulysses which allows you to write in markdown compared to others
And so once you do that, you can convert this JSON document to markdown and you'll get an idea of what it looks like
And you can go into the markdown editors of the world and some of them will actually include like a rich text editor
right next to the markdown editor. So you don't even have to learn to write markdown which in about three seconds of working on it
you will understand how to write markdown or MDX or.md as it's often called
MDX is a little bit more just adds additional like features to markdown files
And so by having that, you now have all your content available in this markdown format
and you literally can take those markdown files and you can upload them to any CMS
You can style them however, but more importantly, you can start basically adding what they call front matter
to different parts of your markdown content. So there's something called front matter CMS that's available
You can read more about front matter as well, but it allows you to basically take portions of your content
that are in markdown and you can basically like put a little bracket around them and say
this is a shorter version of this article. So this is you would add something at the top where you just do like shorter content and then hyphen
and then you would just like wherever you put that bracket around whatever content
you would just label that and it will you just put whatever label that was back at the top
And what that does is allows you to basically or anything say
if you wanted to just take the shorter version of an article and put it in place. You could even allow your users to say I want to read a shorter version of this
or a longer version of it as soon as they came to your site. But it all starts with just kind of getting your content in these markdown files
You can then, you can re-import them to WordPress along with the custom fields that were added
You can put them back into your WordPress database. You can Google how to basically like reverse that process
So markdown to JSON, JSON back into WordPress. But there's a lot of tools you can use as FBA but there's software out there that will automate
and just kind of skip some of these steps for you. If you just search I want to convert my markdown files back into my WordPress site
But I think if you do this project and you carry this process out
what you're going to find is that you can basically take all your articles now
and a Twitter featured thumbnail and a Facebook one and the one that goes into Google Discover
They're all different dimensions, right? So like what you want to be able to do is customize each of the platforms
Not just the dimensions but also like you might want to change the thumbnail completely
for something like Twitter versus something like Google Discover. And now you can actually do that and with tools like AI you totally could
You should be like create me a unique Twitter thumbnail image or a featured image for the Twitter markup or knowledge graph versus the Google one
And then you can eventually get to where the AI is doing a lot of things automatically for you
where it's like you want to market the best possible way possible for each platform
and be optimized for every single tool that's out there. And this allows you to continue to add over time when new things become available
You read online that open AI is bringing in results from websites
and here's the rules for that and you're going to go, well, how would I even do that
How would I add that to my site? You can do this in Markdown
The other option that you have is you can download the advanced custom field plug-in for WordPress
and you can actually use this now but you're going to have to create new fields
and then you're going to have to populate them with content and that might be publication portions of your content into those fields
And some of them might not be used yet but the reality is that every time you have those
it gives you the option to then make your content more portable
You can pick it up, move it someplace else. Somebody else can pick it up, move it someplace else where it can be used by a user
or added as context or given context to something that may need it to build an answer for somebody
It's a long answer but I tried to make it as actionable as possible
Hopefully, it at least gets you started because I think if you can get started here, you'll see the possibilities. Definitely
Well, if you're like Stuart6359 and you have a question. No one's going to have a question now, I'm afraid
I know. I feel like a lot of guys will not stop talking
No, you can leave us a comment on YouTube. You can go to PublisherLab.org, leave us a comment, question, and we will answer it on here
You can find us on our YouTube channel if you prefer to watch this podcast
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And I think that is it for this episode of the Publisher Lab