Serendipity35

Artificial Intelligence has gained very widespread attention in the past six months even among people who consider themselves to be not very tech-savvy. chatGPT and its clones have received much of the attention but the AI floodgate opened wide. So wide that people became fearful and the government became interested in possibly restricting its growth in the U.S. and other countries.

Google introduced a tool to help you write. Grammarly, the writing assistenat that checks your writing, now has a feature to help you write too. Before we put a pause on AI growth, I want to consider how it is already being used in building websites.

You may know that AI can write or revise the code behind websites and applications. I won't comment on that because it's not my strongest area. One of the problems I always encounter when starting on a new website with a client is content readiness. Writing website copy should be something that a client is intimately involved in doing. I'm okay with editing content but prefer clients to write their own initial copy as much as possible. Generative AI technology can draft surprisingly high-quality marketing copy.

I build and maintain some sites using Squarespace and they have integrated generative AI technology into the platform. It is used in their rich text editor, which powers all website text, providing you with predictive text. As with other chat tools, you write a prompt and the AI will generate a draft of copy that you can insert into the text block with a single click.

AI isn't building an actual website quite yet, but no doubt it will one day. And you still need humans feeding the content to it, checking it over and placing it in a design frame. Platforms like Squarespace, WordPress, WIX, et al, have made building a site much easier, but all those platforms will get more intelligent in the next year. Artificial combined with human intelligence will hopefully still provide the best designs.