WordPress Adds AI Writing Assistant to World's Most Popular CMS
Automattic, the owner of WordPress.com and the leading supporter of the WordPress open-source content management system (CMS) software announced a new AI writing assistant this week. Offered through its Jetpack plugin software, the AI Assistant is free for WordPress.com subscribers for 20 uses and then is $10 per month. Users of open-source WordPress software can also access the Jet[pack AI Assistant for $10 per month.
This means it is essentially $10 per month. Any user will go through 20 requests very quickly. The FAQs do not say 20 users per month, but 20 requests. This is similar to how Midjourney works. The upside for users is that there is no cap on use today for $10 monthly subscription users. That is half of ChatGPT and about one-fifth of what you will likely pay for Jasper AI.
Amplifying A Large User Base
Content management systems (CMS) run the web. WordPress is the king of the CMS landscape. BuiltWith says WordPress powers 44% of the 77 million websites it tracks that employ a CMS. Colorlib and W3Techs data say 810 million websites use WordPress in total, which accounts for 43% of all websites on the internet and 64% of those that employ a CMS. WordPress is everywhere, regardless of your preferred market share data source.
Creator Features
WordPress users create a lot of content, so an AI writing assistant is an obvious feature extension. Wix, another leading CMS, introduced GPT-3 powered features for website copy in February. WordPress has taken on a more ambitious feature set. Some of these include:
Writing long form topical content
Creating structured lists
Creating tables
Optimizing headlines
Spell and grammar check
Adapting content to a preferred tone
Summarizing content for use in social posts
Translating text into 12 languages
If you compare this to other generative AI solutions, there is an overlap with software such as ChatGPT, Jasper AI, and Grammarly. The table maker and translation take this up a level. Many publishers have considered publishing in multiple languages but did not want to take on the additional effort. Jetpack AI Assistant may make this easy enough that it is practical to publish in multiple languages, provided the translations are accurate.
What About Images
A missing generative AI feature from Jetpack is text-to-image generation. That is an obvious need for many publishers that rely on stock photos today to make their posts more visually appealing. Future integration with Stable Diffusion or DALL-E seems like an obvious prediction.
Pervasive Generative AI
The introduction of generative AI into such a prominent CMS would normally suggest the potential for a significant market impact. While it may spur more generative AI adoption, there are already more than 100 million ChatGPT users and others using various AI writing assistants. So, it is less clear that this will lead to more trials of generative AI.
The more important factor is it is tailored for WordPress publishers’ needs. It is not as broad in terms of writing styles and templates as a tool such as Jasper, but it is highly tuned to common WordPress use cases.
However, the most important factor may be that there are five million JetPack users. That is far smaller than ChatGPT and about one-sixth of Grammarly, but it is much larger than other offerings in the space.
