Apparently WordPress Comes With an AI Assistant, Now

I’ll be the first to admit I’ve had a sporadic posting schedule. I’m trying to do better this year—which is why I’m typing this piece up on July 4, almost a month in advance—but the historical pattern of this site has been enormous gaps in between frantic bursts of writing. Eight whole months passed between my Halloween special on Lost Cosmonauts and my recent review of Festung Europa; I was away long enough that WordPress made some major additions to its UI while I was gone, including, shockingly, an “AI Assistant” that can summarize text, suggest revisions, and even generate featured images. The future is now, I guess. For this post I invite you all to take a look under the hood, and explore with me the new-fangled gizmos available to your favorite WordPress blogger¹.

The AI Assistant feature is provided through the Jetpack plugin for WordPress, which adds a whole host of tools ranging from analytics to security to search engine optimization. Several Jetpack features, including AI Assistant, appear to be included by default for paid WordPress users—all I know for sure is that I never specifically opted in. The AI itself is based on OpenAI infrastructure; I expect performance more or less similar to ChatGPT and DALL-E.

Given my demonstrated enthusiasm for playing around with Midjourney, the first feature that caught my eye was the AI Featured Image. Unlike Midjourney, which normally takes inputs of a paragraph or less, this service can look at the entire blog post and digest it down into a (hopefully) coherent picture. An example for this article is shown above. Let’s see what it does with some of my other work:

It’s an amusing novelty, I’ll grant it that. But I’d be mortified if I actually used any of those². I think the issue is that AI Assistant offers an enticing promise to harried and/or lazy, corner-cutting writers—“Generate an eye-catching featured image with ONE CLICK”—without providing the customization necessary to make anything good. Your only options are to input a simple text prompt, or to have it use the whole post; unlike in Midjourney, you can’t generate variations, redo particular sections, or iterate with modified prompts. The output it does produce struggles with straight lines and faces in a way more characteristic of 2022 AI than of the cutting edge now. Unless you want to litter your site with garbled dreck, I can’t recommend this feature—if you go the AI image route, please check out Midjourney and put some effort into it, at least.

So that’s what AI Assistant can (and can’t) do for images. What about its other features? Maybe we’ll have better luck with, say, generating some alternate titles for one of my blog posts:

• Original: The Star-Spangled Cosmos: America’s Exceptional Future in Space.
• Suggested: American Spaceflight Renaissance: Predictions for the Future of Human Space Travel in the United States.
• Suggested: A New Era in American Space Exploration: From the Dark Age to the Spaceflight Renaissance.
• Suggested: Future of American Space Travel: Escaping the Doldrums and Embracing a New Frontier.

Eh, no. The internet is already chock full of bland, formulaic, sanitized drivel, and this is just… more of that. “American Spaceflight Renaissance”? “Escaping the Doldrums and Embracing a New Frontier”? Snooze. Show me some zest, please! If you think any of those titles are suitable for publication, you deserve to be sprayed on the nose with a squirt bottle.

AI assistant can also rewrite paragraphs for different tones and styles. Let’s take this excerpt from my essay “Observatory,” published last October:

Original: This time I took the liberty of bringing a tripod and a set of binoculars. For the past several years these had sat collecting cobwebs in my family’s garage, so my dad had no issue letting them go for a weekend.

Formal Tone: On this occasion, I have taken the initiative to bring along a tripod and a set of binoculars. These items had been gathering dust in my family’s garage for several years, so my father had no objection to letting me borrow them for the weekend.

Humorous Tone: This time I decided to be adventurous and brought along a tripod and a set of binoculars. It turns out they’ve been taking a long vacation in my family’s garage for years, so my dad was more than happy to let them embark on a weekend getaway.

Provocative Tone: This time, I dared to liberate a tripod and a set of binoculars. For years, they were gathering dust in my family’s garage, but my dad had no qualms about parting with them for a weekend.

Again, snooze. There’s not even much for me to make fun of here. Though I would like to point out that in two of the three, the AI rewrite changed tense (“had been”–>”they’ve been”) for no reason—I would have thought it beyond such grammatical slip-ups.

We also have options to expand text:

This time I took the liberty of bringing a tripod and a set of binoculars. For the past several years these had sat collecting cobwebs in my family’s garage, so my dad had no issue letting them go for a weekend. As I looked at the old tripod, I remembered the countless family gatherings it had been a part of, capturing memories of birthdays, holidays, and vacations. The binoculars, once used for birdwatching and stargazing with my siblings, now had the chance to be put to use again, igniting a sense of nostalgia and excitement. The thought of breathing new life into these forgotten treasures filled me with a sense of joy and anticipation for the adventures that lay ahead.

And make it shorter:

This time I brought a tripod and a set of binoculars. They had sat collecting cobwebs in my family’s garage, so my dad had no issue letting them go for a weekend.

The “expand” function turned my paragraph into a bloated, hackneyed mess, while “make it shorter” arguably improved it. This might say something about the craft…

AI Assistant isn’t afraid to try its hand at literary criticism, either. It will happily read over your whole article and suggest improvements. It had this to say about my piece on neutron stars:

The content provides an intriguing overview of neutron stars and their unique characteristics, offering a blend of scientific insight and engaging narrative. Here are some actions to enhance the piece:

1. Consider incorporating more subheadings to structure the information and make it easier to navigate.

2. Including more visuals, such as diagrams or infographics, would further enhance the reader’s understanding and engagement.

3. Providing a brief summary or conclusion at the end can help reinforce key takeaways for the readers.

Great work overall!

Why thank you, AI Assistant, I’m glad you liked it! Such as an algorithm with no subjective experience can like anything. Note how vague the feedback is—“consider incorporating more subheadings,” “include more visuals,” et cetera. It’s a bit like a fortune cookie, relying on generalized suggestions that are relevant only because they are broad. It can, at least, assess the overall structure of a post and compare it against whatever it views as the ideal, but I’m not optimistic about getting anything more actionable than that.

Just like ChatGPT, AI Assistant can be a bit of a nag. See its feedback on last week’s post, about the Apollo 20 conspiracy theory:

The content seems to delve into a controversial and debunked conspiracy theory. It’s important to consider the potential impact of sharing such content and to provide clear disclaimers if that is the intention. Additionally, fact-checking and verifying sources can help maintain credibility. It may be beneficial to revise the tone and approach to avoid perpetuating misinformation.

There’s nothing in there about style; just hectoring about the social implications of a joke post. Such dire times we live in, that an obviously tongue-in-cheek description of a conspiracy theory has to come with a disclaimer! Sadly, though, I think it has a point. A lot of people’s sarcasm detectors seem to have broken recently.

Speaking of disclaimers—the policy of this website has been and shall remain the exclusion of AI-generated text from all written materials³. AI images may be used for visual flavor, within the bounds of good taste, but for the actual meat of my posts I refuse to delegate creative control to a computer. Rest assured that aside from the snippets in this article, every word you see under my byline was conceived of in a human brain and typed using human fingers.

And besides, whatever my thoughts might be on maintaining the purity of the writing craft, these tools just aren’t very good. AI Assistant is an active hindrance if you’re trying to produce something of quality. If you want to pound out dreck for clicks and ad revenue, go for it—also, shame on you—but for the serious writer, there’s little of use here. Perhaps its rewrite tools can be helpful for trimming down superfluous prose; once in a while, there’s a nugget of wisdom in its feedback summaries. Otherwise, it’s better to just put in the work yourself.

Thanks for reading, folks. I’ll see you again next Monday!

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1. Which might not be me—but whoever it is, they’ll also have access to these tools. ↩︎
2. Except for the cat emperor. He can stay. ↩︎
3. Unless I’m specifically discussing AI-generated text, as I am here. ↩︎