ChatGPT has been in the news lately for so many reasons. The AI-based chatbot reached a whopping 100 million active users per month in January – a great achievement considering it was launched only a couple of months before. The chatbot has become immensely popular among users and has been the cause of speculations regarding the need for certain professionals like content writers and copywriters in the future.
However, while ChatGPT is unlikely to threaten the position of professionals in the near future in its current version, it has been used extensively for a large number of projects already. The AI chatbot can churn out essays, articles, and novels within a short time, while also helping users create snippets of code. A portion of active users of ChatGPT also constitute cybercriminals – who utilize the bot to improve the structure of their phishing emails and malware. As long as the work doesn’t require data from 2022 and later, the AI chatbot is capable enough to help users with a large variety of simpler projects.
But, as it turns out, ChatGPT is much more useful than one would think – it can even create plugins for WordPress. And considering that WordPress is the most widely used content management platform on the web at present, a large number of users can benefit from this capability. One of the main reasons for WordPress’s popularity is its support for a large number of extensions. Users can choose from a plethora of available themes and plugins to customize their website, or even create and install their own plugins to add specific functions. These themes are especially helpful for Houston murder attorneys and other law practices.
However, until now the creation of themes and plugins was a task left to the experts. The developer needed to be well-versed in WordPress’s theme systems, JavaScript, CSS, PHP, HTML, etc. As a result, website owners without any programming knowledge had to reach out to professional programmers and hire them to develop customized plugins. But that might not be necessary now that ChatGPT can do it for you. As long as the plugin is simple enough, the chatbot won’t have a problem writing it for you.
David Gewirtz, a programmer, ran an experiment using the AI tool and was amazed to see that it took only five minutes to write the plugin – complete with the user interface, logic, and everything else that he would need to install in a website.
He wrote a detailed account of his experiment on ZDnet.com. The programmer provided a detailed one-line prompt to the chatbot outlining his requirements and had a written code in just a minute. And when he copied the code and tested it on the WordPress website, he found that it actually worked. Making some tweaks to the plugin was also rather simple, he just needed to provide exact instructions and the AI tool modified the code to incorporate the changes.
According to Gewirtz, the final output is dependent to a great extent on the quality of instructions provided. If the instructions aren’t well-structured, the code may turn out to be different from your expectations. However, as long as you alter the instructions perfectly, you will have a workable code within a few minutes.
While Gewirtz was impressed that the code was working, he conducted a quality analysis and found that it didn’t incorporate “the best practices of WordPress programming”. However, as long as he added relevant instructions, aspects like code sanitizing weren’t difficult to incorporate.
The programmer concluded that even in its current form, the AI tool performs reasonably well in developing WordPress plugins. However, it has certain limitations, too. The chatbot is suitable only for simpler codes, and even then, the output may not always incorporate the best practices. So, while such AI tools can reduce the need for human developers for simpler coding tasks, the position of experienced programmers is unlikely to be threatened by such chatbots, at least in the near future.