#81 – James Dominy on Why AI Is to Be Embraced, Not Feared

On the podcast today we have James Dominy. James is a computer scientist with a masters degree in bioinformatics. He lives in Ireland, working at the WPEngine Limerick office. This is the second podcast recorded at WordCamp Europe 2023 in Athens. James gave a talk at the event about the influence of AI on the WordPress community, and how it’s going to disrupt so many of the roles which WordPressers currently occupy. We talk about the recent rise of ChatGPT and the fact that it’s made AI available to almost anyone. In less than twelve months many of us have gone from never touching AI technologies to using them on a daily basis to speed up some aspect of our work. The discussion moves on to the rate at which AI systems might evolve, and whether or not they’re truly intelligent, or just a suite of technologies which masquerade as intelligent. This gets into the subject of whether or not AI is in any meaningful way innately intelligent, or just good at making us think that it is, and whether or not the famous Turing test is a worthwhile measure of the abilities of an AI. We then move on from the conceptual understanding of AI to more concrete ways it can be implemented. What ways can WordPress users implement AI right now, and what innovations might we reasonably expect to be available in the future? It’s a fascinating conversation whether or not you’ve used AI tools in the past.