207 – AI in Web Design and Where It’s Heading with Bertha.ai Founder Andrew Palmer

[00:00:00] Josh: Hello, my friends. Welcome into the web design business podcast. It’s Josh here with episode 207. And I have a question for you. This is a hot topic in web design now, do you think that artificial intelligence is gonna replace web designers? Think on that for a minute. Uh, my personal thought, as you’ll hear throughout this episode is no. However, I am not oblivious to the fact that AI is a huge topic of conversation in all industries and in web design, there is already a lot of AI that’s happening, whether you know it or not.

[00:00:35] Josh: So I wanted to have a conversation about this and just see where AI is in the, in the realm of. Web design, whether it is truly gonna take us over. I don’t think so or how we can integrate with it, essentially. I know it feels like we’re diving into a sci-fi movie, but that is where we’re at right now with technology.

[00:00:53] Josh: So I’m so excited to bring on a colleague of mine from way back. This is Andrew Palmer, who I’ve known since I entered the WordPress and Divi community. And I’ve seen Andrew do a lot of different things in his career, um, from running a marketplace to building online communities and being involved with quite a few different businesses.

[00:01:10] Josh: And now he is behind a software called bertha.ai, which is a tool to help you with copywriting for websites. Now some of you may have just rolled your eyes, but I actually want you to check this out because it is quite a cool tool. Um, there, we originally started talking about Bertha and then I was like, dude, why don’t we just have a conversation about AI in general?

[00:01:33] Josh: So this conversation, we actually I was gonna end the conversation by talking about Bertha, but we kind of flip flopped. I had so many questions about Bertha that we kind of cover in the beginning. And then this conversation kind of segues into AI as a whole. So just a heads up on that. We talked Bertha a lot and then AI and its impact in web design here, uh, later on in the conversation.

[00:01:53] Josh: But Andrew is awesome, very, very transparent with his experience and what he sees in the marketplace. And if you are interested in checking out Bertha, just as an assistant for your copywriting, like for web designers, for those of you who just, you, you can’t copyright save your life. And messaging is really hard. This tool is actually a great option to have in your toolbox. So I do have a special link for you.

[00:02:16] Josh: If you’re interested in just checking it out, you can go to Josh hall.co/bertha, and that’ll zip you over to their website where you can see this tool. bertha.ai will be a good fit for you. Uh, and without further ado, sorry for the rhyming, here is Andrew Palmer. Can’t wait to let you in on this conversation. That’s just casual and real about AI and whether it’s gonna replace us, what role is gonna have in web design and oh, so much more. So enjoy.

[00:02:46] Josh: Andrew welcome to the podcast, man. Good to see you. Good to catch up and great to have you on.

[00:02:51] Andrew: Thanks Josh. It’s it’s a, it’s a, it’s an honor mate. You know, we’ve, we’ve uh, had a few cancellations, both sides. I got, uh, way laid in Portugal with, uh, word camp and then I got C, so that kind of, um, muck things up, but it’s great to be here.

[00:03:05] Andrew: Thanks mate. Appreciate it.

[00:03:06] Josh: Same and yeah, I think by the time you said, okay, I can do it. I said, shoot, we’re moving this week and it’s gonna be a little while. So, bye. Golly, we’re here, man. We’re doing it. And I’m excited to chat with you specifically about something I know next to absolutely nothing about, and that is AI and more specifically your company Bertha and how you guys are, uh, dubbed as the Lauren EPSO killer, which I’m I’m I have so many questions.

[00:03:32] Josh: I’m so excited to chat. But, um, for context, you and I go way back, man, actually, when I became, uh, an influencer, I guess, for lack of a better term in the divvy community, we got connected because you used to own a marketplace, but you’re an agency owner you’ve been in the product space. You’ve really done it all. I’m kind of curious, uh, where did this start of Bertha happen? Like where did this all begin for you and how were you? From the, the floor.

[00:03:56] Andrew: Well, the style of Bertha was, and you know, those were heady days, weren’t they? I mean, we had a big, big, uh, Facebook group. You, you developed a good, a great Facebook group and what you became,

[00:04:06] Josh: We have to say it like this too Andrew, we have to say, tell me about the birth of Bertha. I feel like that has to be the way we preface that.

[00:04:12] Andrew: Birth of Bertha, but yeah, so our history is good. Um, anyway, so the birth of Bertha came about by my knowing, uh, a lovely chap called Vito Peleg P. Um, who is the CEO and co-founder of Atarim which is Atarim.io and it’s, uh, it’s started for life as WP feedback.

[00:04:33] Andrew: I met him and basically courted him for elegant marketplace. I wanted to sell his plug on plugin on elegant marketplace, and we became great friends, mainly because we have the same coat, which is just weird. You know, we just literally arrived at, uh, The, uh, ATL, I think Lee, Matthew Jackson or Matthew Lee Jackson did a thing called, um, business.

[00:04:55] Andrew: Anyway, there are only 80 people there. So basically I, I hassled him a house with him and we became good friends and we put his product at him or WB feedback on elegant marketplace. It made loads of money. We became really much better friends because I actually paid him. So that was cool. And, you know, cuz those things happen sometimes dunno, people don’t get paid.

[00:05:15] Andrew: And Vito came to me in may of last year and said, I want Atarim the notes making thing to have an AI creation for, uh, content. Rather than people just writing, put a headline here, put a bit of text here. I want that to be able to be self generated by AI. I’ve gone okay. And he said, I don’t have the development team.

[00:05:41] Andrew: And to be honest, all my financials are aimed ATRI. Do you wanna finance it? And do you wanna get on with it? I said, of course. So we built bertha.ai, which is based on GT three currently now using the Divinci two model. It’s all open, uh, open AI, lot. Most of the AI out there use, um, open AI and GBT three, and basically it’s a content creation tool or copywriting assistant.

[00:06:08] Andrew: And we decided because of the notepad making situation in Ari, we decided to build it in WordPress. So you write where you work. So it’s got a nice little tool there where you, you just in invoke Bertha, whether you are using Gutenberg, Divi elements or any page builder or oxygen, whatever you, you are using.

[00:06:30] Andrew: Got very, very tight integration with all the page builders, but particularly with visual composer who came to us and. Listen guys, we, we love this. We want to, we wanna help you promote this and we want it to be fully integrated with visual composer.

[00:06:42] Josh: Interesting.

[00:06:43] Andrew: Basically I had, because I had the development team and I have had for a number of years, we built Bertha, um, along with veto. It’s uh, a completely separate LLC based in, uh, America. And we are, we are just growing day by day, you know, it’s got three and a half thousand free users, couple of hundred paying users, which kind of pay for the development and stuff like that. But we’re, we’re just growing it and making sure that people know how to use a, a copywriting assistant to help them build websites quicker, faster, and better.

[00:07:18] Josh: You know, and was, was the need initially for like mockups? Is that where you found the biggest pain point where people would just put heading one or heading two and just Latin texts? That’s just junk text. Is that, was that kind of the, I guess I’m beginning out. I was wondering what the main pain point was that this,

[00:07:35] Andrew: well, the pain point, always with website creation, as you know, you taught people how to build websites and build website businesses. What’s the, what’s the biggest pain point is content, right?

[00:07:44] Josh: Yeah.

[00:07:44] Andrew: It’s getting the drive people crazy. And that’s, that’s the whole point of Atarim is, is, you know, it’s a content gathering tool. It’s a feedback tool. It’s a, a, a website management tool and everything like that. So with Bertha, you know, one of our clients was, was so enthusiastic about it. And he, he literally said, man, this is like the alarm IPS, some killer. And so we now use that as our headline.

[00:08:08] Josh: It’s a great line. It’s a great line.

[00:08:10] Andrew: It’s a great line. And we just said, right, we’re stealing now. We’re having that. That’s no, no problem with that. But effectively you can build out a homepage with all your blurbs. You know, you only need a little bit of text for that. So there’s a blurb writer, there’s paragraph writers, there’s, uh, CTAs, you know, call to actions as well, headlines. And it gives you a variety that the most of the copyright, the, the, the AI copywriting systems out there just give you a block of text and they don’t give you any real context behind it.

[00:08:35] Andrew: Because vito’s built a couple of thousand websites and I’ve built a couple of thousand, maybe more websites and, and, and gone through the content nightmare, content gathering nightmare. We kind of know what people want in the website. So right in the page, there’s the sidebar. You’re clicking your, your particular area.

[00:08:53] Andrew: You generate your, your text with context and you edit it as, as, uh, as the editor. So the, the copywriting system Bertha, she’ll write it out for you. Give a, give you a few examples. Some of them might be the same or very similar, and then you could just, it just press the button and it types it into the, the, the, the text module for you. It’s great.

[00:09:13] Josh: That is really cool. Is it also good? I mean, imagining. You’re talking about from the web designer perspective with helping you probably, I would imagine design and, and build out and layout a website around at least some content. For the client too, have you found that it helps designers with their clients understand, like here’s how many words we want in this section or here’s how, how big of a headline we should have in this section? Does it kind of seem to help with that as well?

[00:09:38] Andrew: Yeah, definitely. And also it’s in the language that the, that you are working in. So because it works with all the, all the language models out there, you can, whatever the setting language you put into the first part of the setting, it will reproduce that in, in that, that language. Rather than Laura ipsum because people say, why have you written? Why, you know, it’s really, there’s, there’s some really odd, why have you done it in Italian or Greek or never Latin.

[00:10:02] Andrew: They never ever say Latin or, you know, but banana ipsum or whatever it might be, you know? So it’s better to have some context there. And also it gives you an advantage as a web developer to quickly. Put in the contextual content around what you think your client would want. So if you are building out your page and it’s a plumbers, so you are writing about a plumber in Milwaukee, whatever, it’s got all that, that kind of context and the client can then rewrite it from that, or even use beha to rewrite it.

[00:10:32] Andrew: So it’s a, it’s an opportunity for you as a web developer or web designer to. Give your client start a content without having to think too much about it. That’s the case.

[00:10:43] Josh: That’s cool. Yeah. So it’s see. I didn’t realize how much of a starting point it was as far as actual content. Um, that’s really cool because I haven’t had a chance to really play around with it myself at the time of recording this. I mean, I’ve done my, a deep dive on the site and looked at. When, what it includes, which is super impressive, like it’s such a cool tool. Um, the idea of like having a foundation for content and SEO that you and the client can build off of. That’s it’s really great. You’re kind of a copywriter killer too then, right. Or at least the, the first phrase.

[00:11:14] Andrew: Definitely not. No, definitely. We’ve got, we’ve got, uh, and I always kind of push back against that. We’ve got some copywriters that, you know, there was one, one person out that I know very well. I won’t mention her name. She’ll know who I’m talking about. Just went, what are you doing? You’re gonna kill us. And I say, well, I’m not because we are a writing. We are a copywriting assistant.

[00:11:32] Andrew: So even with you, oh, okay. You are going to have to edit it. You’re gonna have to look at it. What it gives you is that great starting point and the finishing point, you know, you can have a starting paragraph, a middle paragraph, an end paragraph, whatever up to, as as many words as you like, you know, we, our offering is the pro unlimited, for instance, is half a million words a month across any number of websites that you are, you are there across any UN unlimited amount of users as well.

[00:11:57] Andrew: So that’s the differentiator I think with us, is that okay? It’s on the website. Whoever wants to use it, you can also. Separate how many words you want to use per website as well, so you, you know, if you’ve got 20 websites, you can divide that by half a million words a month and, and they each get whatever it is. I’m not gonna work it out. Cause I I’m useless like that.

[00:12:16] Josh: I’m already confused too.

[00:12:17] Andrew: Yeah, exactly. You’ve got the starting point of. Of basically anything and blog writing. You know, if you’re a little bit stuck, you know, one of our demo videos, Iran who does our demo videos, he produced actually 53 tutorial videos in just under a month, which was incredible, you know, ranging from a minute to 10 minutes and stuff like that.

[00:12:36] Andrew: But he wrote a, for one of his clients, he wrote, um, a website, built a website, About diving in Thailand, you know, he didn’t know anything about it and Bertha helped him format that and, and make sure that all the information was right and, and in the right context, it’s, it’s, it’s a great little thought.

[00:12:56] Josh: So I’m actually glad I said that because it was a little bit tongue in cheek, how I said that, but I I I’m sure you get that question or are gonna get that question more and more is like, what is the place of copywriters now, or what is the place of a copywriting service? That’s more personal and custom. If you’re going to use a tool like Bertha or any sort. I mean, I know there’s other tools out there now, too, any sort of AI tool.

[00:13:16] Josh: And I have so many questions about AI. I want to get into next, but it definitely makes sense that this is a starting point in assistant. And I, I would imagine again for the designer and for the client, there’s so many benefits. Seeing content that is much more than just Latin text or something that’s super confusing.

[00:13:34] Andrew: For sure. And you can, you know, you can use it in different there’s many, many different use cases. And in a, I dunno, when this podcast is, is gonna go out, but you know, we’ve got, we did some partnership deals with people in, uh, in word camp Europe, which is, you know, a week ago, as far as I’m concerned here. Um, and, um, We’ve done them with, with quite a major copywriting, um, person.

[00:13:59] Andrew: So, you know, that’s gonna, that’s gonna really blow people’s mind that they are so excited about using this. but as far as any kind of copy it’s best. It’s better for you to say to the client, look, we’ve got this writing assistant, or we’ll be able to do the copy for you. We’ll we’ll give you the basis of it.

[00:14:18] Andrew: And you can actually use Bey yourself to rewrite that content because there’s a, there’s a new, there’s like rephrasing as, as stuff like that as well. And also the client, it gives the client looks at a blank webpage with, with some images and maybe stuff like that and goes, oh, oh, I’m gonna write. And you write about this and, and then you just give birth a, a clue, some context, and, and off you go off you go, you’ve got 250 words, 500 words to start you off. It’s great.

[00:14:45] Josh: I love the term writing assistant. I think that really helps clarify the message and clarifies things for me as far as how I visualize this, because I’m realizing the more we’re talking and the more and more I’m looking to the site, it really. Just that is, it is an assistant to copywriting. I’m sure SEO can come into play with this, all the things. So, yeah, we that’s really cool.

[00:15:05] Andrew: We’ve got local, we’ve got local SEO pages. We’ve got, um, uh, property descriptions for a estate agencies. We’ve got, um, product name generator. We’ve got a fun little thing called evil birther as well. Little sarcastic little.

[00:15:20] Andrew: Oh yeah. Went out there, you know, being a little bit sarcastic a little bit nice. And that’s quite a bit of fun. Again, by the time this podcast is out, there’ll, there’ll be another little thing which will be only available to pro users because what I’ve done, I’ve, I’ve, I’ve always wanted Bertha to be the Grammerly of, of copywriting assistance of AI copyright access.

[00:15:40] Andrew: So, okay. Everybody gets access to everything in except, um, The ability to do user roles and where Bertha where beha appears, but which is kind of a pro thing anyway, but they get a thousand words a month, every single month. Right. So, but there’s something coming within the next couple of weeks from when I’m speaking now, which is we’re calling, uh, it’s, it’s called a quick win.

[00:16:05] Andrew: So you’ll just hit something. Uh, a little popup will come up and it’ll tell you how you can do it. And you say, write me a Facebook post about this, write me an intro email about this, write me a Twitter post about this or whatever it might be. Write me a short story about Josh hall and the fact that he’s just moved house, you know, all that kind of stuff.

[00:16:23] Andrew: And it’ll just, it’ll just help you. And it’s a quick win, quick copy and paste and you don’t need to. Have actually put that into your face, into your, your website as well, so that you can copy and paste that and put that anywhere.

[00:16:35] Josh: Very cool. Yeah. I mean, I’m just thinking about the different evolutions of Lauren Epsom and placeholder text from when I got started in 2010, I think the original, like. Laura EPSO site. I, that was still what I used for years up until I was really still building sites. And then I, then I got turned onto my other favorite placeholder text site, which was just Jeff, some.com, which was just Jeff Goldblum, uh, text quotes and stuff. I always loved that, but then it didn’t look terribly professional when I would add that to client sites.

[00:17:04] Josh: And, um, the idea of having like an automat. A text assistant and content assistant just to put something in there, but then also being able to expand on is really cool. So I think this is a very needed tool. Now i, I would love to talk about AI and sure. The place that AI has in web design, because this is something that, again, I don’t know, I’m I haven’t really personally taken too.

[00:17:27] Josh: Much of a deep dive into, but I see the questions and I wonder myself, like, like I forget it was somebody in my family or somebody recently said, do you think one day people are just gonna be able to say, you know, build me a home inspector website and then the robots will magically be able to do it. Well, I have my thoughts on how far robots and automation can go. But, um, what, I guess what’s your thought on like AI and its role where it is right now in web design?

[00:17:54] Andrew: We’re not far away from building, um, Okay. I’ve got, you know, I go into somebody like, you know, for instance, you’ve got, you’ve got element of cloud, for instance. Yeah. So th they, they then build you a website or you choose a, you choose a website or a website style, and it produces all of your, your pages for you without the content name. Imagine if it, if you just wrote a brief description of your yoga business or your plumbing business, or your electrician business, and you gave your name, your, your, your location and address.

[00:18:24] Andrew: And and a couple of services that you put in there. And then all of a sudden Bertha rewrite all of that content and just you, you are, you have produced a website. So we are not, we’re actually not very far away from that. Um, not necessarily with element of cloud or anything, but we’re certainly as Bert of what we are working on is.

[00:18:43] Andrew: Auto generating content based on, um, let’s say a workflow. So what’s your, what’s your homepage? What’s your, what are your services? How many products have you got? Whatever it is. So it’ll then produce all the product descriptions and then down the line imagine being able to describe your products. And not have to take any photographs of them.

[00:19:07] Andrew: How good would that be? And it just produces your featured image of your, your, your products. So that’s a few years down the line, but that, you know, the power of AI is can be abused, but the power of AI is there. It’s already there to be able to, as long as you have a workflow, because it can only work like you and I, if I say to you, right, built me a yoga website, and then you’ve got you as a designer develop, may have built a couple of yoga websites, you know where to get the photographs from.

[00:19:34] Andrew: You kind of know what’s yoga yoga’s about, you might go onto Wikipedia and, and the history of yoga to, to kind of build it all out. But if you have a workflow within Bertha gives you a workflow of this is a yoga website it’s based in Wisconsin. It’s run by three people it’s been established since 1928 or whatever it may be, or AI will then be able to write the contextual content around the parameters that you’ve already given it. And that’s how AI works.

[00:20:06] Josh: And I’m curious, I wanna talk about AI as a whole as well, uh, even outside of Bertha, but with this idea of like putting some information in whether it’s service related location related, and then it kicks out automated content. How does that work from an SEO perspective? And what about duplicate content?

[00:20:24] Josh: Like if I were to create two really similar sites in the same town, would it potentially kick out the exact same information for each blog post? I’m? Sure a lot of people would ask and, and question that like how, I guess how unique and custom would each site be with automated, you know, AI type of generated text and content.

[00:20:42] Andrew: Well, just like you and I, when we are having, we are having this conversation now, I one, I don’t know what questions you are going to ask me a minute ago. Mm-hmm uh, and I, and two, I don’t know the answer that I’m gonna be giving because I’m thinking about it all of the time. So it is going into my brain. I’m thinking about what kind of answer I’m gonna give you.

[00:21:01] Andrew: I’m forming letters, which become words, which become paragraphs, which become stories. And I’m doing that on the fly and that’s exactly how AI works.

[00:21:12] Josh: Okay.

[00:21:13] Andrew: So although I might tell you a story, let’s say about elegant marketplace in the particular product that we had. And I’ll tell you that story today. If I tell you that story tomorrow, it will be slightly different because I will, I will, I will put a different spin on it. If you like, for, for one of a bear word, I’ll put a different turn on it, you know, and that’s how AI works.

[00:21:32] Andrew: So yes, there, there might be similarities between the yoga site that you’ve built today and the yoga site that you’re gonna build tomorrow for a other customer, but the similarities will be so dissimilar that, that they will be different. And the, and Google won’t really react to whether that’s D say, right. It’s another yoga site. You know, it’s talking about yoga, it’s talking about yoga, it’s talking about whatever it may be. So the content is always going to be unique. That’s the beauty of it.

[00:22:02] Josh: That’s a great answer.

[00:22:03] Andrew: AI people not understanding what AI is gonna be, cuz it’s not copying anything. It’s actually taking the information that it’s scraped. So now open AI have scraped everything up to June, 2017. Um, rather than october, 2009 or something. So it’s got even more information, it’s it strike 10% of the web to just see what stories are out there and it’s randomized and everything like that.

[00:22:28] Andrew: So it’s got more context and more information to be able to develop the stories that it’s gonna tell, whether it’s a blurb saying I’ve got, I’ve got a great peppermint here, or there’s a fantastic set of leather boots here that you, that you really don’t wanna miss. You know, those are, those are the kind of things that AI will do. It will think literally for itself.

[00:22:52] Josh: I love that answer, Andrew, especially how you framed it as like, if I talk about an old company that I ran today and I talked about it tomorrow, it’s gonna be a little bit different. Some of the key things might be the same. The components might be there, but it’s gonna be a little bit different depending on the day. And as you mentioned, AI evolves, I mean, this tool evolves. Every minute. Right? Is, is that fair to say?

[00:23:13] Andrew: Every millisecond quite? Yeah. It’s quite incredible. What, uh, There is so much I want to do with Beery. Now I want to get image generation in there. I want to get, you know, complete websites built. I want to get complete books written. I want to, you know, do all kinds of, uh, advisory things, consultancy books, or you know, how to do SEO the best way and all that kind of stuff. You know, written by Bertha, uh, AI.

[00:23:39] Andrew: Uh, there are certain constraints. There’s time for a start. You know, we’ve got a small team and there’s money. You know, these things take, it takes a lot of investment to get to do the R and D you know, we started building Bess. So the idea was, um, you know, talked about in may 21, uh, by September, 2021. The end of 28th of September, actually 2021. We launched.

[00:24:08] Josh: Now I have to kind of play devil’s advocate for a little while here, because as somebody who has built my brand off of pure organic, personalized, just outta my heart, through my fingers, content. Have to say, I don’t want everything to be automated. And I can’t personally imagine building an entire site that’s automated. You know, I, I love the idea of this helping in a lot of areas, but I would still, even as a web designer, wanna have my touch on everything.

[00:24:36] Josh: I guess one question I have for you is like how far. Well, there’s a lot of different questions I have that come to mind, but I’m just kinda curious from your perspective, Andrew, like, how do you personally feel about AI is do you think more, so it’s gonna be a help to people to just make life easier and to, to help when people are stuck or do you, do you worry about it?

[00:24:57] Josh: Just overshadowing creativity and then becoming, you know, Too automated. What, what, what’s your personal thoughts? I, I guess I would imagine as, you know, being the, the founding floor of this company, you’re probably really excited about AI, but do you have any personal reservations towards AI?

[00:25:13] Andrew: Definite, definitely. You know, I don’t, I’m very concerned about robotics. For instance, I’ve got a, a very good friend of mine. That’s invested tens of millions of dollars into a robotics company. And, you know, I’m very, I’m privy to what what’s going on there and I’m kind of going. Oh, , you know, because you’ve got, oh, just kind go. Oh, blind. Right.

[00:25:35] Andrew: So there’s worries from that scope because that’s the, that’s the scary bit of AI. It’s the Terminator stuff I’m coming along to kill you or, or whatever it is. the benefits of AI let’s, let’s just look at the benefits of AI from a health perspective. Right. Okay. So imagine you could, you’ve got an AI doctor that has, has gone down 20,000 successful heart operations. And then you have a robot driven by, by that AI that is unemotional and will make the right decision as, as to that heart transplant or that heart operation.

[00:26:09] Andrew: So that’s, that’s a benefit. Yes. Always supervised by a human. The disadvantage of AI is you’ve got, you’ve seen these big drone displays, right? Have you seen them where they’ve replaced fireworks?

[00:26:22] Josh: No, I haven’t. No.

[00:26:24] Andrew: Then, because they’re amazing. I’d rather see one of those cuz one it’s good for the it’s. It’s great for the environment, but they’re driven by AI. Hmm. If you flip that round and put a little gun in the drone and drive that by AI a drone’s this big, you know, it’s a 12 inches by 12 inches or a foot by a foot, whatever.

[00:26:45] Andrew: Then that’s the scary bit that you, you instruct the AI that you’re gonna right. We want to go and get Josh hall and he’s somewhere out there. They find they’d look on the internet, find out where you are and all of a sudden, boom, you know, you’re gone. That’s the negative side of AI.

[00:26:59] Andrew: the positive side of AI uh, productivity will increase, um, costs will decrease. Eventually you have, uh, opportunities for, um, The right design at the right time or in, in, you know, so whenever we do a product design, we’ll look at it and, and it would go through iterations of design. Imagine if you say to a, to an AI, I want the new version of Tesla, or I want a new version I want a car. That’s gonna be economical driven by batteries. Not necessarily lithium, whatever designed me, that car.

[00:27:34] Andrew: that AI can build that car in its in it. Environment and give you a blueprint of the perfect car. This is how this, how this car’s gonna work. It’ll probably be self-driving, it’ll have, uh, different compounds on the tires. It’ll have, um, ultra, um, efficiency on the batteries, all that kind of, so those are the benefits of AI. Mm-hmm the disadvantage of AI is science fiction. If, when you look at science fiction and they you know, there’s that little kid in a program called AI and your children are all, you know, you adopt a child, that’s a robot or whatever.

[00:28:10] Andrew: That’s the disadvantage. People gotta kind of almost blinker themselves to that side of it. And think about the advantages of, of, of AI running, um, the stock markets, for instance. So it’s not emotional the, of AI running, um, you know, being the management systems for, uh, any kind productivity situation that you need.

[00:28:30] Andrew: You know, I’m not that into it in as much as, as, as I’m not a futurist. If you, that Matt Lenwood did a podcast the other day on WP Tavern, the last 15 minutes of was him being a futurist and, and how excited he is about AI. Go and listen to that, cuz he, he kind of knows what he’s talking about, but from a productivity perspective, from an exciting perspective of, of people being able to create a living from using AI.

[00:28:57] Andrew: Not losing their living you know, we said it isn’t this the end of copywriters. No, it’s not. It’s the start of, of a new breed of copywriters. Okay. And, and the copywriters that are gonna that experience copywriters, and they do it off their head and they do all their own R and D they’re gonna transition into being using a writing assistant, not necessarily birther AI. There’s, there’s, there’s a few out there.

[00:29:19] Josh: Right.

[00:29:19] Andrew: But if you, you always use the tools that give you the best opportunity to do the best job. We know that through using divvy.

[00:29:27] Josh: Yeah. And that’s what I, that, so that’s the excitement there, which Def yeah, definitely makes sense. I mean, anything it’s, it’s a lot like any sort of content collection tool or design tool or templates, even layout packs, whatever, anything that will make your life a little bit easier, whatever can be automated.

[00:29:43] Josh: And that’s, that’s all, I mean, technically a lot of that is like, The crude version of, of AI, anything that you can get a machine to do, or like, if you can do things with CRMs or like, I use Zapier like crazy now to link a bunch of stuff together to automate things, instead of doing it myself, that’s a very basic version of AI. It’s letting well, the computer,

[00:30:02] Andrew: you will be able to, you you’re with Zapier, for instance, and, and, um, connectivity tools like that. You’ll be able to instruct an AI. You’ll be able to say to an AI verbally I want this, this, and or if this and that to happen, and that will then the AI will then build you that connection. You don’t even have to even click a click a mouse. It’s great.

[00:30:23] Josh: That sounds awesome. That sounds very cool for sure. Now, so you mentioned the episode that Matt Mullen wig, uh, for, for the, the creator of WordPress automatic, um, was on WP Tavern. I’ll make sure we link that in the show notes. I’m gonna check that out as well.

[00:30:38] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:30:38] Josh: Episode 30. Awesome. I’m definitely looking forward to, uh, to hearing that, to hear his perspective in I’m sure. I’m kind of curious about the landscape of WordPress in general as well. Um, and yeah, I mean, AI, it’s funny because there’s like, of course, when you think about AI, you think about robots taking over and killing everybody, Terminator, matrix, whatever.

[00:30:56] Josh: Uh, as a sci-fi kid, that’s all I can think of immediately, but now I’m thinking about it on like a, a micro level with, in particular with, with websites, because a lot of people have wanted to know like, Are they gonna replace web designers? I personally don’t think you’re ever gonna get so any sort of creative problem solving service with AI completely done.

[00:31:15] Josh: I mean, I think you’re right, Andrew. I think it’ll help in a lot of areas and it’ll make people’s lives easier. Um, sometimes harder, depending on if they can’t make up their mind and, you know, they paid for an AI service and they’re like, wait, I don’t like that. Uh, I could see it benefiting, benefiting in a lot of ways.

[00:31:31] Josh: I’m kind of curious. What do you think the next step for AI and web design in particular? What do you think the next step will be? I mean, you guys are on the forefront of the content side of things and writing assistant. Do you think there’ll be a push towards actual, like. Like designing of some of some sort or layout, like what do you think the next evolution of AI for web design?

[00:31:52] Andrew: Well, it is, I’m very lucky to know a chat called Matthew Rense who’s very up on AI and, um, visual creation and even video creation, uh, from scratch. Imagine, you know, you, you a, uh, a Fox running in the woods. You say, produce me a, a, a 32nd segment of a Fox running in the woods and the AI will produce you a 32nd segment of a Fox running in the woods.

[00:32:19] Andrew: Totally drawn from code. Right? So that’s the future of web? Yes. I want a website. That’s got. He, these are my hex, coz these are my brand colors. This is my, I want the logo to be an arc. The name of the, the company is called Grove city, whatever it might be and, uh, the content. And I’m providing a service that does this, this, this, and that from here there and everywhere.

[00:32:47] Andrew: Build me a website. Absolutely. That’s exactly what’s gonna happen. And whether or not it will produce great websites. I dunno.

[00:32:56] Josh: Right, right. That’s a big question.

[00:32:57] Andrew: You don’t be, don’t be, um, misled that that’s not gonna happen because that’s gonna happen. They usually, I now to build buildings, you know, they build, you know, there there’s a building in, uh, Dubai that was basically designed by AI. And it’s just a couple of building. I can’t name him, but I, you know, I read it in, I think Matthew was talking about it and he’s he’s, he is just, the architecture was completely designed by an AI and it put in all the stress points and all the, you know, cuz it needed to, to go against the wind, you know, all these high rise.

[00:33:26] Andrew: Buildings and everything they need to, to have, uh, wind shuttering put the built into the system. So they don’t basically blow over or blow people over in the street when a Augusta wind comes and it, it creates a wind tunnel. You know, there’s all sorts of complexities around that. So it’s gonna be in architecture.

[00:33:41] Andrew: It’s definitely in ship building. You know, I’ve got co colleagues and clients at the moment. Ian Percy is, is building a, um, an electric boat. Um, it’s gonna be an electric powered ferry. You know, each they’ve just launched it, you know, there’s, there’s these, these, these maritime companies that are using AI and interaction and, uh, kind of metaverse type things to design these things so that they’re they’re most efficient. So it’s already here. It’s already helping us design great products.

[00:34:11] Josh: I guess what I’m really curious about to be honest is how AI is going to work on a creative. Type of playing field, like web design to where I built some designs for clients. And on the first try, they were like, you’re this, you nailed it. Like, this looks beautiful. I love it. And then I would do the exact same type of project with somebody else. I thought I knew exactly what they wanted. They would say I hate.

[00:34:33] Josh: I just don’t know. I don’t, I don’t like it. Like, I just, this is not what I was thinking. I’m like, well, I, I, you, I did exactly what you told me you wanted to do. So I guess I’m really interested to see how AI is going to mix with creativity and, and just the human side of things. You know, like, I mean, I guess somebody could just pay an AI tool to keep on doing a different version until they find something.

[00:34:54] Andrew: Well, you nailed it. It really, you just, you know, if you go a sentence or two back, you nailed it. I did exactly what you told me to do. Right. So that’s what AI’s gonna do. It’s gonna tell you exactly what you tell it to do. Is there

[00:35:07] Josh: AI would have no bedside manner talking to clients, right? It’d be like you are idiot, mean.

[00:35:12] Andrew: You say, I want, I want you to build me a website in the style of Monnet. Or in the style of, uh, um, Nike, you know, I want a website that’s gonna be in the style of, or in the, to, I want it want it written I want the, the, the text to be written in the, in the tone of voice of Josh hall, you know, or Franks Archer or Terminator, you know, whatever it may be that, so you, AI works well under instruction.

[00:35:45] Andrew: And that’s the key is it’s not sentient currently, not, you know, even, you know, the Google guy that’s been suspended for making, thinking that the, the chat bot that he was talking to the other day was, was sentient or becoming sentient. Oh, it’s not quite, it’s not quite there yet, but so AI still has to do, is AI AI, I’m talking to you, you are the AI guy, or you are my web designer. I’m telling you what I or I’m telling you the look, the, feel the mm-hmm tone of voice, the, the, uh, the colorways I’m telling you that, and that’s your job to interpret it, right?

[00:36:18] Andrew: Because you’ve got, you’ve got talent and you know how to put that in your mind. AI’s exactly the same. It’s only, it will only produce an interpretation of what it understands. That you want.

[00:36:32] Josh: So I think it would really, it’s fair to say. It would really only work well on both sides with how descriptive you could be initially. Sure. Because if I, if I told an AI tool to say, build me a coaching website, Who, who knows what it’s gonna kick out? Like what industry, what colors, all the details. So that would be interesting too, to see like how far it would come with, like the type of details you would submit, which, I mean, I guess you’re right.

[00:36:59] Josh: Technically we are in the role as web designers right now of getting client information, figuring out what they want, deciphering, you know, every, the goals and all the things that are involved in a website and then kicking out the final end product that’s gonna get them the result they’re looking for. So in a way we’re kind of that we’re the mediator right now, kicking all that out that I do love

[00:37:18] Andrew: the difference between us and AI is that we are powered by, you know, we’re carbon powered. AI is, is powered by whatever it is powered. You know, it’s a robot, basically, if you think about it as a robot. So it’s not a living sentient being the difference is that we have, we have, uh, the benefit of free thinking, which is sometimes of being negative, frankly, you know, because we can come up with ideas that like your client said, well, You just didn’t understand why I wanted, I mean, that is that I was talking, I’ve told you’re a great designer.

[00:37:48] Andrew: You’re empathic. You kind of knew what you were talking about. And I, you know, and all I see now is just a, a five pages of disappointment, you know, so yeah, AI’s gonna produce a thousand pages of disappointment and one page of, of absolute genius. And that’s where we’ve gotta, we’ve gotta make sure that we don’t overestimate or over, uh, expect what AI can produce for us as creators within the web world. Um, you know, it’s, it’s that simple.

[00:38:18] Josh: Now what about DIYs and business owners who try to do websites on their own and eventually try to use an AI tool? I personally don’t think web designers, web strategists, web marketers, digital people. I don’t think there’s gonna be any sort of downturn for this industry.

[00:38:34] Josh: If anything, I think AI IAI would probably make more opportunity for web designers to help people and, uh, be able to focus on what they wanna do, because I just can’t imagine a, you know, blue collar guy who has a handyman business playing nicely with an AI tool. Like I just, I, I feel like he is going to want somebody he’s gonna want a personal touch.

[00:38:56] Josh: Somebody that knows what they’re doing, knows domain stuff. He might not even know how to figure out setting up his email. So, um, if I can barely figure that out, I’m sure know, you know, a lot of other people can’t. So I guess my point is I wonder the role of AI with the standard business owner. Average person, DIYer who might be able to get by with a w site, but they need a web designer to build in a professional site. What, what are your thoughts on that with how AI would work with the DIY crowd?

[00:39:22] Andrew: Did you, did you just allude to the fact that Wix wasn’t a professional website building tool?

[00:39:27] Josh: Well, very fair. Yeah.

[00:39:31] Andrew: So, well, imagine a weeks having birther AI. So you’ve got, and again, let’s, let’s go DVY cuz we, we know divvy and we know, we know it very well. You have your page layouts now they’re very kind. And, and sometimes they put in a headline or something and they’ll put in Laura MIPS and text. But imagine I’m a, I’m a DIY, which is basically what divvy aim at as well. They aim at the DIY market as well as developer in the designer market. It’s just a very quick way to build websites.

[00:39:59] Andrew: So imagine you’ve got birther AI on a divvy website. And you just click into each item that they’ve got. You don’t change the design at all because you are, you are the DIY, it’s all there for you. You know that the, the images are copyrighted to you. You’ve got you. You can use those images. You’re just clicking and you say, okay, introduce the company about this.

[00:40:20] Andrew: Here’s the service products that I’m giving and, and you, and you’re just clicking around and birther is, or another AI. Producing the content for you. So it’s that it really is that simple. You in a place, give it some context. It will write a paragraph or a blurb, even a contact form blurb, you know, where you’ve most people have just contact don’t they?

[00:40:43] Andrew: So we’ve, we’ve developed a thing, contact form blurb. So there’s, there’s an extra bit of text that you put under contact. So it gives you the context of why you should, it’s called to action of why you should contact us using this.

[00:40:53] Josh: I guess I wonder as, as you’re talking about that from just. Typical client perspective. I wonder if AI is actually going to appeal to DIYers more than website designers like myself. I wonder if that would be the case.

[00:41:06] Andrew: Uh, that could be, that certainly is the case. We have a few DIYers, um, out there and they’re loving it and you know, you know, I get lots of personal messages saying to know, well, this is just amazing. It saved me lots of time, but from, from both DIYs and, you know, copywriters and there’s one particular, fairly big copyright out there that just said, I, I, I, I will continue using this tool. It’s just amazing.

[00:41:31] Andrew: There’s a, there’s a use case. There’s an AB tester out there using, using it to, just to do the, the CTAs for, for AB testing, you know, using a very small part of the power of Bertha to make sure that there’s um, a differentiator between the other website, you know, it’s, it’s well written copy it’s well formatted and, and it’s, and it just makes sense. So I think from we, we are aim at WordPress. Website owners. There’s no doubt about that. So we are aiming at, at, at the guy that wants to, or the guy and the girl that wants to build their, their, their standard business website.

[00:42:08] Andrew: And it’s built on Gutenberg and, you know, they’re using Gutenberg patterns. So they, it’s very simple for them to, to put in text, um, or cadence blocks or whatever it might be to the, to the, the high end developer that’s self coding even, or using a, a page builder to make it a faster thing to market. Right through to people that are using things like Elementor cloud and, and even wordpress.com, you know, where it’s almost a prebuilt website and all you gotta do is fill in the text. And make it make sense.

[00:42:38] Josh: Yeah. So I, yeah, I could definitely see that. I mean, where this whole conversation has really shined the light on the fact that AI either in a simplistic form or really complex form is gonna work for DIYers or web designers, agencies, developers, whatever. I, I do feel like there’s probably a very large crowd and a lot of people who are listening to this that are just like me that are very hesitant to jump on the AI train.

[00:43:01] Josh: Uh, as far as a whole, again, not ju just for a tool like Bertha, you know, assisting with content. I love that, but it would be the trust of like build me something in its entirety. I’d be, I’m very curious. To see how that’s gonna pan,

[00:43:14] Andrew: but it wouldn’t be fun wouldn’t it? Wouldn’t it be fun to start doing that? Wouldn’t it be fun to have that facility and just to use that for, you know, for free for a little while and go, my goodness, I built a great website here.

[00:43:24] Josh: Well, and it’s even, it reminds me a lot of like what a lot of my students do and what I did to some extent with having like a basic, like, just like a template starter site. Where it’s like, if you can’t afford the $5,000 package, then for 1500, I can, we could do, we could base it off at a template. Gimme this amount of content. We get five pages and we can get this up for you within a week kind of thing.

[00:43:47] Josh: Um, it reminds me a way you could utilize it for like that. It’s like, well, you know, here’s our custom route with all our automated tools that help. But if you, you know, if you’re just starting, you have barely any budget, then there is an option here we can assist with. And then there’s the, the I AI site kind of thing. I wonder if that would come into play.

[00:44:05] Andrew: Well, here’s one for your business. Um, you know, cause I know that you teach people how to, how to build with, so for your 1500, your $1,500 or 1500 pound website, the lovely thing about birther is that when you generate content, it keeps the history within the website. So you say you build, um, you build your, your templated website with your templated copy. You’ve still got all that copy.

[00:44:30] Andrew: So when you build another one template’s website with all that copy, you’ve still got all the copy in the right places. And then you just rephrase it for that.

[00:44:39] Josh: Okay. So it, it just learns and expands on itself. Every site you design.

[00:44:44] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:44:45] Josh: That’s interesting. Now on that re on that note for web designers, I’d love to just. Kind of getting ready to wrap this up with talking about what really, what we should do next. Like what’s the next step for web designers here? What should we maybe keep our eye on? What, how do you think it’s gonna be really important for web designers to integrate with AI?

[00:45:04] Josh: Um, granted everything continues at this pace and even a faster pace, potentially. I, I guess my question would be like, where do you foresee web designers capitalizing on this? Where do you, where do you think we have the best chance of, of this not hindering? And putting us outta business, but, you know, making it even better for us, uh,

[00:45:23] Andrew: not wasting for content.

[00:45:25] Josh: Okay. Yeah, that, that doesn’t make sense. Yeah. So, but aside from that, even just AI in general, like, um,

[00:45:32] Andrew: well, AI, AI in general will help them, will help them build faster and better, I think, because you’ve got, you’ve got the advantage of. Of using almost an automated process. Um, you know, there’s some interaction in there and that’s, that’s a very important thing about open AI. Let’s not forget the, the terms conditions of using open AI, which is our end. The engine that we use is that there has to be user interaction cause they’ve thought about this.

[00:46:00] Andrew: Right, right, right. Elon Musk was one of the co-founders of it. And I mean, he thinks very deeply about AI and the dangers thereof and repetitive stuff going on. So you’ve got to have some user user interaction. That’s why we’ve very specifically said that Bertha is a writing assistant. So use Bertha to your advantage to build out your websites quicker. I did very quickly, Josh I’ll just go into many years ago I did a Bristol meetup WordPress meet up about, you know, the PA if you, even if you are a coder, why should you use page builders?

[00:46:35] Andrew: So this was be, this was like divvy 2.7 in the elemental one or whatever it might be. And the reception was amazing and lots of people have, have, have changed the way they work because of that only in Bristol, probably, you know, cuz it wasn’t on the web, but certainly the presentation was 35 minutes and you had a 15 minute Q and a session.

[00:46:55] Andrew: So either the presentation was crap or, or people really wanted to know about it because I was. There for 45 minutes with a cure of people saying, how do I do this? Or what do I do this what’s the best one to use or whatever it is. When something new comes along, that you can see there’s a productivity benefit as a web designer I think you have a duty of care for your business and for your customers to at least give it a good go.

[00:47:21] Andrew: So that’s what, that’s why we did birther AI. That’s why we built it into WordPress. So, because we, we, like I said, the phrase is. Right where you work. So you don’t have to go off to another platform. You don’t have to copy and paste it. You don’t have to lose it. It saves all the content that you’ve done. Um, just use it to your best advantage and that’s it. You don’t have to, but why not? Why wouldn’t you?

[00:47:43] Josh: Yeah. Well, I like that little quote you said there, if there’s any sort of tool that comes along, that helps productivity helps you save time, save costs. It’s a benefit for you as a web designer and for your clients too. All in all regards. Yeah. But it can also make you more profitable too. If you are able to save money on copywriting or content assistance or time or automation and something is working well, and you can add it to your suite of stuff, then by golly, absolutely go for it.

[00:48:11] Josh: So, yeah. Well, it kind of reminds me of too, like, even from like my podcast transcripts, like be before there was like O AI and all these other transcript tools, somebody would have to like write out everything somebody’s saying. Captions are automated now, and that’s a form of AI itself. So, um, there’s a lot, I guess I say that to say, as I’m thinking about this, I’m using AI a lot more than I realize I do. And I think that’s the case for a lot of people. Would you back me up and saying that andrew?

[00:48:37] Andrew: Up the a hundred percent? I mean, we, we, we, um, well, if you’re driving a Tesla, you’re using AI, you know, if you are, if you are doing a podcast and you’re doing auto transcriptions, Using AI, you know, if you’re using something like descript or if you are, you know, because again, that’s an editing software that uses a bit of AI to go on.

[00:48:55] Andrew: If you’re doing, um, a Google search, you are using AI, you know? Yeah. Because that’s, that’s that we, you know, at is very basic level. Google is now using artificial intelligence to control what we see. That’s the scary. Yeah.

[00:49:11] Josh: Oh, there’s so much scary to it. Yeah. We need to have like a version 2.0, of all the, the scary version of AI, but at least in web, in web design, it doesn’t, it doesn’t seem like I, I’m not like scared of anything. The only thing web related of AI is just obviously with any sort of, uh, issue with, with currencies and monetary kind of stuff. I mean, uh, hacks and whatever. Like there there’s a lot of those things. Uh, could come into play, but as far as like designing websites and helping clients, I, I definitely feel better with this conversation about it being a help rather than a hindrance.

[00:49:44] Andrew: So if you think about it, Josh, we, we hear the word algorithm a lot, right?

[00:49:51] Josh: Oh, yeah. Especially with social media, even outside of, uh, probably more so outside of websites. Yeah.

[00:49:56] Andrew: Algorithms are part of AI. Aren’t they that’s, that’s what drives, right. It’s a mathematical calculation to get an end result. That’s all, AI is right. Simple as that. It’s binary.

[00:50:06] Josh: And look with algorithms, especially with SEO. That’s why I think when so many people talk about algorithms and then they end up getting to like the source of the people at Google or whoever work on these it’s like these things have. Made themselves into their own little beast. Like, I don’t know how much control to be honest. Somebody at Google has on all the algorithms for local search and keyword stuff.

[00:50:28] Josh: Like, I don’t know how much control they have at this point. I think it’s just kinda learned on its own. And it’s, I think they’re trying to keep up with this little AI thing that is dominating and controlling SEO, at least that’s, that’s definitely the view on that.

[00:50:41] Andrew: I definitely think, I think, I think you’re, I’m absolutely right. I mean, you know, the algorithms are around, um, Advertising for instance, you know, how does, how does Google decide? Which adds to, um, display when 10,000 other people have bid the same amount of money, which one goes first? You know? So, um, it, it, it, it’s a tough thing, but like you say, we are all using artificial intelligence in our daily lives.

[00:51:09] Andrew: Maybe realizing it, especially you’ve got an automated Hoover, you know, you’ve got a little, little, little vacuum going around your kitchen. That’s AI.

[00:51:17] Josh: Yeah. Well, that’s so funny. You mentioned that we’re about to get one because we have a much bigger house now that I don’t wanna, I, I, I tend to do a lot of the sweeping. My, my wife does most of the chores, but I enjoy sweeping, but on a bigger house, it’s like, okay, this is becoming a triple the job. So by golly, I’m gonna go AI and get a little Hoover to take care of some of that. So what Andrew,

[00:51:35] Andrew: you’ve got, you’ve got children to look after for goodness sake, who wants. Sweeping up when you got. Two or three kids going around.

[00:51:42] Josh: Exactly. It’s like sometimes it drown, it drowns their whininess out when they’re in, uh, in moods. So it can be good, but Hey man, this has been . This has been great. This has been a really interesting chat and I love what you guys up to with, with Bertha. I was gonna ask you kind of your final thoughts, but I think you really hit it that big point of like the designer role, the what web web designers. You know your thoughts on the mindset. We should have to embrace this, but you know, not to be afraid of it, not to not use anything, but we are all using it way more than we think.

[00:52:12] Josh: So, um, that really kind of was a, a great closing point to this. And definitely everyone can go to, to check out Bertha. Uh, I do have a link with you guys now, so you can go to Josh hall.co/bertha to, to check it out. And yeah, I love what you’re up to. Andrew. I love that you guys are forward thinking on all this, and I’m excited to see where all this goes in the future.

[00:52:31] Josh: Brilliant. Thanks, Josh. I really appreciate the time being able getting this out to your community as well. It’s awesome.

[00:52:37] Josh: Yeah. Well, keep at it, man. I’m excited to see, uh, what you do here in the future and hopefully the robots don’t all kill us within 10 years so we can keep on doing our thing.

[00:52:44] Andrew: Well, if we’re still alive in a year’s time, gimme another shout and see where we are. We’ll we’ll be, we’ll be making videos with AI by now, by then. yep. This programming for us to be chatting along on by AI.

[00:52:54] Josh: That’ll be very interesting deal.

[00:52:57] Andrew: All right, sir. Brilliant. Thanks man.