WordPress 7.0 puts AI in core. Are you letting customers switch it on?

[Artashes]

Most probably expected it to come. 7.0 shipped with the WP AI Client built into core. It's opt-in and needs the site owner to add their own API key. On paper it's not your problem (as a host). In practice, umm... not so sure.

Besides a security headache that eventually lands on hosting companies and concerns that malicious text somewhere like a common field could trigger changes, I can already see a ton of customers firing off AI calls with zero idea what tokens cost, then come asking you why something's slow, or why their API key got emptied.

So, I am curious, are you enabling, restricting, or ignoring the AI client on managed WordPress? Is anyone seeing support tickets tied to it yet?

 

[bigredseo]

Nope - turn it off ASAP!

Unless you absolutely need it, it's going to bloat the heck out of everything.

We're seeing people enable AI and using it for everything from SEO Titles, Descriptions, Article help, etc. I'm all for HELP; I'm not for "click - that was easy". Too many people are letting AI write everything and while they might read through it, they're not actually writing anything themselves.

I've been guilty of this in the past too - so it's not just new people - but AI for writing, creating new pages, new sections, etc., it's going to cause problems.

We have a client who, every two days or so, tells us, "ChatGPT said to do this, so I did it" - he's essentially wrecked his store. AI is just regurgitating whatever it finds online, and that's a problem.

Tokens is another issue, as you said, people are requesting things and not realizing that they have to pay for it after "X" number. We're seeing people argue with hosting companies about how they've done something for security and that prevents the user from doing something on their site. The host's solution: get a VPS or Dedicated machine and feel free to break it 🙂

Just because it's available, it doesn't mean it should be enabled. The majority of sites out there don't need AI, just as most of them don't need "live chat" answered by AI. Let Google incur that expense.

And with all of that said, we have been able to use the heck out of AI and have a crazy enterprise solution that we've been working with a client on, handling technical documents that are restricted from public distribution, but through their members area, an AI can address and evaluate the technical documents to help guide a decision.

We haven't seen any problems with bandwidth - it's pricing that happens out of the blue that seems to be the big sticker shocker.

 

[Mivocloud]

To be honest, this is a very interesting point that is worth keeping in mind when working. Personally, I want to hear the opinions of those who actually use it, though my personal take is that YOU CANNOT ALWAYS AND EVERYWHERE ADD AI.

 

[bigredseo]

I want to hear the opinions of those who actually use it

I've used two that are built into WordPress to completely build a WordPress site. It looks pretty decent but still needs some code tweaks - code that would be beyond a drag-and-drop user's level.

I've also used AI (ChatGPT and a separate Claude instance) to build out two sites for testing. Again, for the most part it does OK. In both of those cases, however, instead of building out templates, it just generated HTML and then included it as the content within the site. So it spit a header.php and footer.php and then copy the HTML code it produced into the content area. It looks OK, but if you want to edit it, you better know HTML - and most customers don't.

A place where I have used AI Agents and built them into the website as their own plugin for our clients is interpreting the error logs or debug.log file. This has been pretty awesome. If the user gets a critical error, they can now copy the URL into a section of the site where we have our plugin; it pulls the URL, compares it against debug, and gives them an output. Then they click submit and that email comes to us to resolve. The advantage is that it gives them an answer immediately as to what happened; it'll give a fix too, but pretty much all our clients just send the email to us, and we then fix it.

Now THAT is part of AI that I wholeheartedly embrace and recommend for sites.

 

[Mivocloud]

Regarding the code, I completely agree with you that if a user lacks programming knowledge, it will be a big problem. No matter how advanced AI gets, it still makes mistakes and needs to be double-checked.

Honestly, that's completely normal, and in this regard, I view AI as a Junior developer who does excellent work—but that doesn't mean it shouldn't be verified.

If you truly managed to integrate it into your workflow and create a plugin or tool that has proven to be incredibly useful for your clients, then that is very, very cool!

 

[Incognion]

Most probably expected it to come. 7.0 shipped with the WP AI Client built into core. It's opt-in and needs the site owner to add their own API key. On paper it's not your problem (as a host). In practice, umm... not so sure.

Besides a security headache that eventually lands on hosting companies and concerns that malicious text somewhere like a common field could trigger changes, I can already see a ton of customers firing off AI calls with zero idea what tokens cost, then come asking you why something's slow, or why their API key got emptied.

So, I am curious, are you enabling, restricting, or ignoring the AI client on managed WordPress? Is anyone seeing support tickets tied to it yet?

I personally do not like and want this AI madness.
They are injecting this so-called AI into everything.

Yes, AI is helpful sometimes and great if you know how to use it.

But it still annoys me when I see AI is in everything.

I think someday they will use AI to give birth to human babies or even AI babies. 😄 🤣