[00:00:00] Jason Tucker: It’s episode number 35 of DevBranch, GPT’s Gone Wild. I’m Jason Tucker. Go to my website at jasontucker. blog.
[00:00:27] Sé Reed: That was short. I’m Sé Reed. That’s my business address. That’s interesting. I’m here, I’m there. I’m in the discord.
[00:00:34] Jason Cosper: And you all know who it is. It’s your boy, Jason Cosper, back at it again on the world’s most influential WordPress podcast.
[00:00:41] Jason Tucker: And that podcast can be found wherever it is. You can find awesome podcasts including Spotify.
[00:00:48] Sé Reed: Oh, is that a place to find awesome podcasts? I don’t even know anymore.
[00:00:52] Jason Cosper: Unless you’re looking for ours.
[00:00:55] Jason Tucker: And hang out with us in our Discord, wpwatercooler. com slash Discord.
[00:01:04] Sé Reed: Now I’m having a thought about Spotify, and how they monetize your, they like take your data and give it back to you in a pretty format, and everyone’s oh, I’ll join that because I want them to tell me something and make up a cute name for it.
[00:01:19] Jason Tucker: Yes, exactly.
[00:01:21] Sé Reed: yeah, I just had, I was like, oh, that’s how that works.
[00:01:24] Jason Tucker: That’s exactly how that works.
[00:01:28] Sé Reed: Anyway, okay. Just to start us off on foot, hi people in the chat. Oh man, y’all, this is I love our title, I really do. We just landed on it and anyone who’s of a certain age, of millennial will understand the reference. But I just couldn’t we couldn’t find any other way to encapsulate what is happening.
[00:01:58] Sé Reed: And BT dubs, we aren’t talking about AI. Data rights necessarily. That’s not what we’re talking about. Not that we would have anything to talk about that topically or anything, but we are talking about AI in Yes.
[00:02:20] Jason Tucker: Yeah.
[00:02:21] Sé Reed: in the machine. I was trying to figure out like is it a, is the code in the code?
[00:02:26] Sé Reed: Like the,
[00:02:27]
[00:02:27] Sé Reed: Like it’s like an out, like it’s a, it’s like code building code and then the human being like, I’m gonna try to use this code.
[00:02:35] Jason Tucker: Yeah.
[00:02:35] Sé Reed: it is. That’s what we’re talking about. Isn’t that clear? It’s clear.
[00:02:38] Jason Tucker: It
[00:02:39] Sé Reed: Haha.
[00:02:39] Jason Cosper: So the thing that kind of sparked this all off is Tucker, you, I don’t know if you have that up or handy or whatever, shared a post with us.
[00:02:48] Sé Reed: No, I shared that post. It
[00:02:50] Jason Cosper: you shared that post?
[00:02:52] Sé Reed: shared that post.
[00:02:53] Jason Cosper: Okay,
[00:02:54] Sé Reed: shared the post. We have a chat where we figure out
[00:02:56] Jason Tucker: in the morning. I can’t even
[00:02:57] Sé Reed: Yeah. I shared, see what happens is
[00:03:00] Jason Tucker: never
[00:03:00] Sé Reed: a post like earlier in the week, which is might as well have been like three years ago. This week a lot happened. And then Jason, because he is our stalwart producer that keeps this show so he’s like the heartbeat.
[00:03:15] Sé Reed: So he, as he does, was like, hey, why don’t we talk about this thing we were talking about earlier? And then we’re like, oh yeah, that
[00:03:22] Jason Tucker: scroll back, look for a link.
[00:03:24]
[00:03:24] Sé Reed: He wades through the madness of whatever it is, and some weeks there’s less madness, some weeks there’s more
[00:03:32] Jason Tucker: what was that post about? What was the I understand what I can, I understand the premise of it, but do you guys remember the exacts on it?
[00:03:41] Sé Reed: Yeah you can fetch it, but do you want to fetch it? Or do you want me to fetch it? Who shall
[00:03:47] Jason Cosper: I
[00:03:47] Sé Reed: the link?
[00:03:48] Jason Cosper: While we’re if you want to go through scroll back or whatever, but I can
[00:03:55] Sé Reed: Scroll back. Yeah, can you? And then I will summarize it. It is from a I don’t actually even know that they were specifically a WordPress person, now that I think about it. But the general sentiment of the post on Mastodon, so the toot, let’s just, I guess they’re all just posts now, right?
[00:04:17] Sé Reed: Everything’s a post? The general sense of it is This person is spending a lot of time in their support forums debugging code that people are writing with ChatGPT that then is not working. Bummer. There it is. You got it. So yeah, it is WordPress but it is also more general as well. It’s not just WordPress, but the StackExchange.
[00:04:45] Sé Reed: We’ve all been there. We have all been to the StackExchange, right? I go there. I don’t go there as much as I used to sometimes I end up there and it’s like on a post from five years ago and it’s useful to
[00:05:01] Jason Tucker: but so now you’re essentially debugging some code that the person who actually posted about it didn’t actually even write it.
[00:05:09] Sé Reed: So now you’re helping. Yeah.
[00:05:11] Jason Tucker: code.
[00:05:12] Sé Reed: Yes. What is that? That is a feeling. Because I think the whole reason that the something like the stack exchanges, the various stack exchanges work or forums work is out of the idea of yeah. Yay! What we needed more of was bad code. I’m so glad we’re replicating more bad code.
[00:05:43] Sé Reed: But I think the goodwill the whole idea is that people who are in there are answering questions, sharing their knowledge, passing on their information, best practices tips and tricks that they’ve picked up along the way. And if you are You know, the idea is you’re helping a fellow developer, you’re helping out people who are working in that language, who care about it, who are, like, interested in it, right?
[00:06:12] Sé Reed: Supportive may not be official contributing, but that WordPress exchange has supported my growth as a WordPress developer.
[00:06:22] Jason Cosper: sure.
[00:06:24] Sé Reed: And even, I don’t even ask questions, I just read other people’s questions. So now we’re going to get this what is it even? Just a glut of people with bad code, because they don’t know, they don’t know what they’re even looking at, right?
[00:06:44] Sé Reed: They’re like, build this thing, build it in whatever, and then the computer just spits stuff out, and there’s no way for them to even know if it works or even know where to put it, necessarily.
[00:06:55] Jason Cosper: A big thing that I’ve noticed is you have these folks that tend to think that they can fall back on a service like Fiverr on these kind of like bargain basement things. And there are a lot of legitimate people who earn a living off of Fiverr. And I’m not going to knock that down.
[00:07:19] Jason Cosper: But there’s a lot of people who are just looking for like the cheapest option, everything else. And I feel like services like ChatGPT like Gemini now from Google could not be madder, sorry to interrupt you, could not be madder, and every time someone says Gemini from Google, as a Gemini, I am contractually obligated to say that is not acceptable, okay, sorry, please proceed
[00:07:49] Jason Cosper: And not even there,
[00:07:52] Sé Reed: hang on.
[00:07:53] Jason Cosper: there’s another internet protocol called Gemini that’s supposed to reproduce what Gopher did back in the day, but with some updated stuff
[00:08:03] Sé Reed: Why do they all want to be us? Are we, I guess we’re, Geminis are just that cool. What? What? There’s not enough words? Yeah, let’s go to back to the ancient Greek. That’s a great place to go for words. Actually, I think that is a good place to go for words personally, but they made up all the other ones.
[00:08:21] Sé Reed: They should just
[00:08:22] Jason Cosper: but
[00:08:22] Sé Reed: making up words.
[00:08:24] Jason Cosper: you’re running into these things where people who think, oh, I can just a lot of time use the free chat GPT account, but worst case pay chat GPT 20 a month and have it write code for me. And just tell it, Hey I need a WordPress plugin that does this, I need to modify this code to do this.
[00:08:55] Jason Cosper: I need
[00:08:56] Sé Reed: Okay, but wait, I do use ChatGPT to do that. So I have I, but it’s like for code I write, I’m like, recreate this function but switch out the tables to blah and blah, and it just spits out my same code and then keeps the, I don’t have to write that stuff then.
[00:09:18] Jason Cosper: you know what the correct code looks like. A lot of these people who are asking ChatGPT asking I won’t even mention the Google service, but using, yeah.
[00:09:31] Sé Reed: say Google. I don’t know why they don’t just keep calling themselves Google. Everyone really doesn’t know how to use branding. It’s so annoying.
[00:09:39] Jason Cosper: Using OpenAI solution, using Google solution, using whatever out there I think if Copilot.
[00:09:51] Jason Cosper: through HuggingFace, you can get access to CodeLlama, which is Facebook’s like open thing that in.
[00:10:01] Sé Reed: That’s funny. Codellama. I think I bet Mark Zuckerberg thinks about his employees as Codellama.
[00:10:07] Jason Cosper: Sure. They probably all I haven’t kept up with Facebook, but I’m sure that there are plenty of business cards that still say ninja over there. Yeah, big oof.
[00:10:22] Jason Tucker: So you could go into chat GPT and say, I want to do this thing in WordPress. And then you could take that code and then take it over to meta AI or whatever and be like, Hey, can you debug this code and tell me if it’s good. And then you could take that over to the other one and say, Hey.
[00:10:41] Jason Tucker: Can you debug this code as well? And then that’s regenerative, you’re going from one thing to the next and you may essentially, if you start taking code from one to the next year, you’re now building out a generational code as you’re going through each one of these steps to figure out if it’s correct or not.
[00:11:03] Jason Cosper: Do you remember that Google Translate game when Google Translate came out, where you would start with a phrase in English, translate it to Spanish, translate the Spanish to Italian, translate the Italian? Yeah. And then.
[00:11:19] Sé Reed: Translate, they think of the funnest stuff, they pay artists to think of
[00:11:22] Jason Tucker: But
[00:11:22] Sé Reed: for them, they really
[00:11:23] Jason Tucker: do it between romantic and not romantic languages and change it between those, cause that’s when it really screws it up good.
[00:11:33] Jason Cosper: So eventually you get back to turning the phrase out into English and it’s fucking gibberish and that is the code that and if you look at it, like a lot of these coding tools, even though PHP is such. Like widely used language. It’s one of the most popular languages in no small part to WordPress, which and we can get into this cause it’s DevBranch.
[00:12:02] Jason Cosper: It doesn’t even really stick to like PHP coding standards. Like we’re
[00:12:09] Sé Reed: So many thoughts about PHP these days,
[00:12:12] Jason Cosper: Yeah.
[00:12:13] Sé Reed: standards and the world of what is happening with PHP and the PHP Foundation and the PHP the WordPress code sniffer. It has just been a wild fiasco of, I think, not, I wouldn’t say fiasco, but like what’s a potential fiasco?
[00:12:35] Sé Reed: What is that? There’s a ticking time bomb. There it is. I was like, there’s an expression. It’s like just a giant ticking time bomb of standards, really, right? That are not being kept up. That was all of last year’s Hubble Hulu with PHP. But even I was it on the show where we were talking about the people who were working with SiteGround? And keeping their I don’t think it was. I recently was talking with someone about SiteGround, and they needed they were, like, updating someone’s old site, and they said maybe it was Nai that I was talking about this with. I don’t know. But whoever it is, I apologize that I’m not attributing this conversation to you.
[00:13:25] Sé Reed: So this is a second hand story. But the SiteGround Allowed them to be on PHP, I think it was, I don’t think it was like five, I think that would have been like blowing my mind, but I think it was like seven or something like that. And they were like, how is this, like the person who I was talking with was like, how is this okay for this to be on this?
[00:13:48] Sé Reed: Like it’s not secure at all. And they say, oh as long as they go in there and check the button that says I agree that I’m using an out of date. If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to me, and I’ll be happy to help you
[00:14:14] Jason Cosper: If you think about it from a business standpoint, they’re probably like their money spends the same as the people who care about keeping their shit up to date. So might as.
[00:14:26] Sé Reed: People. We corral them over here on their own server.
[00:14:30] Jason Cosper: What we do over at Dreamhouse specifically for this is for people who want to stay on an older version of PHP we cap them at PHP 7.
[00:14:41] Jason Cosper: 4 and we use a project that and we don’t allow this on DreamPress because it’s our managed solution. We
[00:14:52] Sé Reed: Yeah, we don’t, you are, you get to choose whatever PHP. I use, disclaimer, I use PHP, DreamPress for a lot of things. I want you to choose my PHP. You do that. I’mma pay the hosting company to do that.
[00:15:08] Jason Cosper: our shared, our VPS customers all those folks who have a wider choice in what PHP they use and still want to use 7. 4 have to basically pay us to maintain that version of PHP 7. 4. So we go in. And we’ll like our security team yeah, it goes back and looks at what other projects are doing.
[00:15:37] Jason Cosper: I think I think GoDaddy or one of those services actually has a I’m trying to remember what other host is actually participating.
[00:15:53] Sé Reed: That’s like my attribution. I was talking with someone. We’re good at attributing today.
[00:15:57] Jason Cosper: Yeah. Very, yeah I’m sure that I’m sure that what was it? Attribution needed or whatever on Wikipedia, right? Yeah. Some shit that was said on dev branch absolutely counts. As
[00:16:22] Sé Reed: we are the attribution. Yes. Sorry for interrupting you.
[00:16:28] Jason Cosper: No, it’s all good. But it is effectively just a way where it’s like, Hey, if you want this old version of PHP one, like it’s going to be maintained.
[00:16:42] Jason Cosper: Cause there is a community of people out there who are interested in keeping PHP 7. 4 going until there is software out there that. can be, they’ve accelerated the timeline for how long old versions of PHP, get wiped out. And I think that’s a good thing. I think that we should keep moving forward, but when you have software like WordPress that has code that was in it, that was written.
[00:17:13] Jason Cosper: Nigh on 20 years ago you’re still going to have some stuff that just does not run well under PHP 8. 1, 8. 2, 8. 3 and so on. I think that is so fascinating not to totally devolve into the bus factors of the web, but there are so many of these little pockets. PHP is one that’s a crucial stool leg for WordPress, right? But there’s like all of these different crucial components. And I I think that it’s really interesting that we are reliant on that and Not even, it’s not even the fiasco of the day, right?
[00:18:01] Sé Reed: It’s not it doesn’t, it’s not even as big of a deal as it should be. Anyway, sorry, you’ll get us back on the GPT track. Sorry, we went on a total, our
[00:18:10] Jason Tucker: that’s all right. I was waiting for your conversation to run out of steam so I could jump in. So one of the, one of the things I was thinking about when we were we’re working out all this stuff was the idea that a lot of people are using GPT stuff to be able to come up with the small solutions that they need, either, either it’s an entire.
[00:18:33] Jason Tucker: Plugin, or it could just be a line of code or a line of, a command line that I want to be able to run. In in the, my normal day to day work I do a lot of stuff with systems administration stuff, either on computer servers, or desktop computers, and stuff like that.
[00:18:52] Jason Tucker: And I’m seeing a trend in that, that a lot of the the way in which I would do something like write some PowerShell in Windows to be able to have it do a specific thing, stop a service and start a service or something like that. The tools that I have now have a box that just says, describe what you want to do.
[00:19:11] Jason Tucker: It’s Oh,
[00:19:11] Sé Reed: Does it have those little three stars next to it, because that’s
[00:19:14] Jason Tucker: just says, yeah, it says I want to restart the print spooler. And that’s all you just tell it to say. And then out on a box pops up the four or five lines of code that you need to restart the print spooler and start it back up again.
[00:19:27] Sé Reed: that’s built into your program now. So
[00:19:31] Jason Tucker: I’m using.
[00:19:32] Jason Tucker: Yeah. So it’s are they using?
[00:19:35] Jason Tucker: Think about it. You just go, can I do this thing? Sure. Do it. And then
[00:19:38] Sé Reed: Is that using its own little LLM then, essentially?
[00:19:42] Jason Tucker: Yeah, exactly.
[00:19:44] Sé Reed: that’s really awesome.
[00:19:45] Jason Tucker: yeah, it knows all the different tools. It’s look through the manual pages to figure out like if I asked for this thing, here’s the different commands that you could use to do it.
[00:19:55] Jason Tucker: And then it knows a lot of the commands that should be ran to do this. What I’m wondering Is this something that could happen with WPCLI where you could say, I want to reset the password for the administrator account and then it says, okay here’s what you need to do.
[00:20:12] Sé Reed: Isn’t that the, it’s, I think that was the goal behind the, what landed on the name of command interface, right? For in the admin itself I think that was You know, like that the spotlight bar on Mac or this pop, whatever that thing is, it pops up I think the idea behind that was originally more spotlight, and then as AI just suddenly came on into everything, it’s oh that’ll be where you can just describe what kind of theme you want, or say I want this, and then it’ll build that, right?
[00:20:47] Sé Reed: So I think that’s like, Where it’s going, that would be based off of I guess a hyper local LLM for WordPress’s own core LLM, which would be really neat. I have been talking a lot with my, some watchers of the show will know I talk about my brother, who’s the my, like a, an advanced dev programmer, he’s doing AI stuff and local and LLM stuff and building them and talks about the matrix and stuff.
[00:21:20] Sé Reed: But we’ve actually been talking about, the other day he was like the real problem. And I was like, what? He’s agents. I was like, agents? What do you mean? Is that, what are you talking about? And he’s like agents. I was like, no, like agent Smith. Oh, those agents,
[00:21:36]
[00:21:37] Sé Reed: Like the agents that are doing something.
[00:21:41] Sé Reed: So it’s, yeah. So
[00:21:43] Jason Tucker: to do the task.
[00:21:44] Sé Reed: yeah. And, but then it becomes its own AI that is then talking to all the other AIs and improving its own dialogue. So it essentially is. What that was in the movie, The Matrix, right? Agent Smith was representing a specific program that was interacting with whatever else was happening and adapting, whatever.
[00:22:10]
[00:22:11] Jason Tucker: Yeah,
[00:22:12] Sé Reed: wee!
[00:22:14] Jason Tucker: I think the thing is A good time to be alive.
[00:22:16] Jason Tucker: yeah like with those types of tools, especially with something like WP CLI is you have the base command set that comes with it. And then as you start adding plugins, these
[00:22:27] Sé Reed: That’s interesting.
[00:22:29] Jason Tucker: commands that go along with it. So
[00:22:31] Sé Reed: So then you’re, it becomes your own little LLM
[00:22:34] Jason Tucker: Yeah. Cause you need to know what’s installed. So
[00:22:36] Sé Reed: or all of
[00:22:37] Jason Tucker: have to look and say little things.
[00:22:41] Jason Tucker: Oh, okay. So this particular, maybe there’s like a plugin that’s installed for managing cache. So you want to be able to clear the cache. Or if you’re doing something with like adding a user, like what’s being described in our chat, like there, those
[00:22:57] Sé Reed: there’ll be like these little libraries, like again, not to reference the matrix, but like you remember when he downloads fighting with flying a helicopter or whatever? He’s
[00:23:05] Jason Tucker: The lexicon gets
[00:23:06] Sé Reed: now. Yeah. Like you add gravity forms or I don’t know, newsletter glue or something into your site and then it adds a little library.
[00:23:15] Sé Reed: And it
[00:23:15] Jason Tucker: and verbs
[00:23:16] Sé Reed: it’s you need to put together. Yeah.
[00:23:18] Sé Reed: and then.
[00:23:19] Jason Tucker: you need to put together, be able to make the command
[00:23:21] Sé Reed: Wait,
[00:23:21] Jason Tucker: correctly.
[00:23:22] Sé Reed: I know where we can put the library files, you guys. We can put it in the uploads folder. Sorry, I just had to say that.
[00:23:35] Jason Cosper: here’s the thing. There, there already is a place that when you add plugins, when you add more functionality to your site you can configure it and know what’s installed and everything else. It’s called the WP admin dashboard. Like the CLI is meant for. Power users who need to know what to do adding a copilot, adding something like that to WPCL.
[00:24:10] Jason Cosper: I just use the damn g like gooey instead. Because all you’re doing is
[00:24:20] Sé Reed: Yeah, I’m saying that the GUI is going to be its own GPT, that’s right, so it’s going to be the search bar, not even the CLI, because the CLI, you’re talking about backend, right? That’s backend stuff. The command interface, which always sounds very Star Trek ian to me. Open the command interface. Computer. Open the command interface. Okay. It that is for the admin and that is to do things within the admin. But hear me out. What if this gets put in Jetpack and then everything that goes into that gets fed into I don’t know, a fire hose that was being sold to an AI company that went back into it and then it becomes a more basically oh god, I just had a horrible, I was going to think about the snake with the, with, that eats its own tail, right?
[00:25:19] Sé Reed: The
[00:25:20] Jason Tucker: Yep.
[00:25:22] Sé Reed: on this show, oddly but instead I thought about a movie that’s a really terrible horror movie that involves terrible things and I of like garbage in, garbage out kind of deal which I’m not, yeah, I didn’t want to say it. I was trying to not say it. So awful.
[00:25:39] Sé Reed: I never saw it, but just the concept is really hard for me. Yep.
[00:25:44] Sé Reed: But that’s what I feel like we’re doing right now. That’s like the future. Not necessarily specifically with Jetpack but the future of all these AIs. I feel ChatGPT has gotten dumber, personally. I feel like when we first started using it last year, it was, like, better.
[00:26:05] Sé Reed: And even the 3. 5 was, like, I don’t know, I don’t know. Maybe It’s like nostalgia, year long, year old nostalgia or something, but the more, we’ve been talking this week a lot about the data that goes into these AIs and the idea of poison data through things like Nightshade, which is for visual images and then I don’t know what you poison text with.
[00:26:32] Sé Reed: Can you even poison text for that?
[00:26:34]
[00:26:35] Sé Reed: That it?
[00:26:35] Jason Cosper: yeah we were
[00:26:38] Sé Reed: You’re like, oh yeah!
[00:26:41] Jason Cosper: We were a good example,
[00:26:43] Sé Reed: Oh
[00:26:43] Jason Cosper: I was gonna say we were joking around about this. I was I spent a little time earlier this week trying to think of something that effectively redirects AI crawlers to a version of my site where all of the posts have been translated into Scott’s English which I’ve been reading, train spotting.
[00:27:07] Jason Cosper: And for those of you who,
[00:27:09] Sé Reed: really hard to read.
[00:27:11] Jason Cosper: Yeah, for those of you who don’t know, Trainspotting is written in Scott’s English with the slang and everything else. So you have to get used to reading like Oot and Doon and like all of the other more like complicated phrases, words and you fall into a rhythm after reading it for a while.
[00:27:34] Jason Cosper: But And then words like grok, like from A Clockwork Orange, start coming into your vocabulary. And now you’re talking like Ewan McGregor in Trainspotting.
[00:27:45] Jason Cosper: Yeah.
[00:27:46] Sé Reed: Suddenly you’re climbing through a toilet. Look, we have a theme this week, you guys. Why is our chat, why does our GPT theme have so much to do with toilets?
[00:27:54] Jason Cosper: Tucker, please, with
[00:27:57] Jason Tucker: So the other the one that I that I started thinking about then when we brought this up was, I don’t know, it was a couple of years back, I want to say it was maybe four or five years back that the messages app on the iPhone where. The autocorrect started to take in suggestions from other people that are using autocorrect.
[00:28:20] Jason Tucker: And so after a while, you would start texting someone and it would like, it would tell you, it would suggest a different spelling for something. And it’s like the new trend of how to spell something. And it just started getting worse and worse.
[00:28:35] Sé Reed: Do you know what
[00:28:36] Jason Tucker: so you get to the point where people are writing stuff in a very specific way, and then you go to write it and it’s no, you need to write it like the cool way.
[00:28:45] Jason Tucker: Here’s the way that we’re saying these things now. Yes,
[00:28:48] Sé Reed: actually happens? I thought you were going to tell the story. I thought this was what you were going to say, because I have a vague recollection of you telling me this, but maybe it’s just other people. Once people have me in their phone my name, S E with an accent, I think it was you, right?
[00:29:03] Sé Reed: I think you were
[00:29:03] Jason Tucker: the damn time.
[00:29:04] Sé Reed: you’re like writing C, like I see something, and it comes out Sé, and you’re like, why, I’m not trying to text Sé right now.
[00:29:11] Jason Tucker: Yep. The other way that it, it does it too, is when
[00:29:15] Sé Reed: I thought it was you.
[00:29:17] Jason Tucker: Siri dictation and Sé is the worst.
[00:29:21] Sé Reed: Yeah. They did. It’s a rough
[00:29:22] Jason Tucker: but I’ve also the other thing was, is having putting people’s names in your in your contacts or company names into your contacts. Like for instance, WPwatercooler is a contact that has no phone number or anything that’s in my phone, just so whenever I say the word WPwatercooler, it spells it correctly,
[00:29:43] Sé Reed: That’s
[00:29:43] Jason Tucker: it puts it all together correctly, so there’s those sorts of things that yeah, you have to look at, but that really goes back to the way that these, the LLM stuff works is that by giving it guardrails to work off of.
[00:29:57] Jason Tucker: By saying, Hey, here’s all the collection of words that you’re going to be using. That lexicon is the way that it makes it so that they’re able to now start working off of that because they need to know what’s the noun, what’s the verb, how do I make these pieces get put together and then what are the ways in which those like different either the attributes for it or the arguments that it needs in order to build out that collection of words to be able to say, Hey.
[00:30:26] Jason Tucker: Do the thing.
[00:30:28] Sé Reed: so does this mean we just have to invent new slang? Constantly is what I’m, like, all of our, or you have to have coded did anyone read Encyclopedia Brown when they were younger? I’m really hitting on some millennial old millennial stuff today. I know, it’s wild, but I learned from Encyclopedia Brown that you could write on a piece of white paper in lemon juice and then you could hold it up to a light bulb.
[00:30:52] Sé Reed: I didn’t start any fires with this, but I could have you’d hold it up to a light bulb and it would But I think it’s common to have that kind of stuff, but I’m not sure that’s really being used in the community. Just I think it’s more I think it’s more I think people are trying to figure out but I don’t think it’s really being used in the community. I don’t know if that’s something that’s being used, but I think it’s more like, not being know, not having stuff scraped or even being able to detect in in the, let’s just circle back to the beginning, right?
[00:31:27] Sé Reed: In these debugging requests, there’s this oh, my, and my headphones just died, so that’s, hopefully it doesn’t get weird. The,
[00:31:36] Jason Cosper: good.
[00:31:37] Sé Reed: I’m post, I put in the thing so you can bring it up, but there’s this thing which I’ve been reading about, because actually, mostly because of the story about the guy in Scotland, I think, who did the Willy Wonka the Willy Wonka experience, and AI generated the website, like, all the text, and the images, and then AI generated descriptions of things, and then created the most asinine sad experience.
[00:32:09] Sé Reed: See, he didn’t take it far enough and ask. The GPT, what he should do for the experience, like how to set that up, failed on that part. But in the articles about that the authors that I read were talking about, oh, we ran through like his different, like he has a, some House of Illuminati website or something, right?
[00:32:29] Sé Reed: And they ran all of his various stuff, link his LinkedIn, his books that he has on Amazon, ran it all through this GPT zero thing. And it’s like AI. AI created. So this chat, so this GPT 0 thing can scan and essentially assess, I don’t know if it’s code so much, it’s text for sure where you can and I don’t know this is like how the bugs work like The GPT 0 is going to get better, and then the chat GPT is going to get better, and then GPT 0 is going to get better.
[00:33:01] Sé Reed: It’s going to be like this race to the bottom or the top, or I don’t know, the scoot off to the right. I don’t know where we’re going
[00:33:10] Jason Cosper: It’s mutually assured destruction.
[00:33:14] Sé Reed: that is exactly, that is where we’re going, that’s what it feels like. So I’m wearing my zinefest shirt today because zines are actual things that you can hold in your hand and cannot be updated or obliterated or modified, unless you physically modify it, as can books.
[00:33:30] Sé Reed: Just gotta keep one foot in reality. But I think that this zines at my desk.
[00:33:37] Sé Reed: yes, I have zines right over there. I think that It would be interesting to bring some of that GPT 0 into something like And it would need to be automated, right? It doesn’t post your request, and maybe this would be good for the WordPress forums, right?
[00:33:58] Sé Reed: It doesn’t post your request if it’s run through that and it feels like it’s AI generated text or AI generated code, and it’s gonna be like, no, you can’t even post that. Because we’re trying to keep crap out, essentially. Or maybe even in the plugins. I don’t know if that would work for that.
[00:34:16] Jason Cosper: Like a kismet?
[00:34:18] Jason Tucker: Until your IDE that you’re using is writing this code for you. The thing is like the, these tools exist and people are using them. So it’s not it’s not because of the fact that you’re using this, that you are doing something bad. I
[00:34:35] Sé Reed: That’s the thing, right? Yes.
[00:34:37] Jason Tucker: some merit to be had there.
[00:34:39] Jason Tucker: Like you can use a GPT solution to be able to come up with some type of solution and to see whether or not that actually is going to work for you. It’s just like doing your
[00:34:51] Sé Reed: I use it all the time.
[00:34:52] Jason Tucker: to figure out like, what happened if I did this and
[00:34:55] Sé Reed: I use it for outlines, I use it for code checking, I use it for I’ve used it for some formal stuff that I need to draft formal letters or whatever, so I think that it has, and this is the problem there’s no hard line here between good use and bad use. Copious amounts of air quotes. I don’t know why the reaction shots don’t do air quotes. They really should do that. That would be rad. Sorry.
[00:35:25] Jason Cosper: You brought this up earlier that you use GPT sometimes for your code,
[00:35:33]
[00:35:33] Jason Cosper: But the difference between you and the people who are posting for help in like that the big difference there is what that code does what the output should look like, so if.
[00:35:51] Jason Cosper: If there is bad output from an AI, enough to fix it. Most people who are cheaping out and instead of hiring a developer, like one of the three of us, like any of the people who hang out in our discord any of the thousands of WordPress developers who are. Out there and they’re just like, oh I can just type some stuff into this free service and hopes it like gets me to where I need to go.
[00:36:24] Jason Cosper: This
[00:36:25] Sé Reed: Then the key thing is you can do that and then keep asking chat GPT for help, but the kind of egregiousness which comes in where the the Willy Wonka ness of it. I don’t know what we’re going to call it, the Oompa Loompa meth labness of it comes into play when you then take your chat GPT generated code that you can’t read and you go ask another human being to help you fix it for free with because so you’re like, it becomes the user of, is literally a user at that point, right?
[00:37:00] Sé Reed: They are the middleman of siphoning off of others, like without. groking without groking the situation at all. So I think it just really, this actually goes back to what I was talking about with my brothers that I feel like this really, it does help, it helps a lot of people, but it also enables bad actors and people with bad intentions hustlers, hucksters, whatever, to put up a good front, enough to like build out a bunch of parents out of a lot of money, or get a plugin approved, or put up a WordPress website, or WP website with a plugin that you’re selling It enables that, and it enables it quickly.
[00:37:50] Sé Reed: It You know, you can fill out an entire LinkedIn profile, a fake one really quickly right now, right? You could just be like, invent a persona and slap that stuff up and load in the you don’t have to sit there and be like okay, 91 to 93, it would make sense if they did they were at school or whatever you just ask the chat GPT, fill it in.
[00:38:10] Sé Reed: So it speeds everything up. It speeds up our processes for good things for code debugging, but it also speeds up. The bad acting and the glut that’s happening now because we don’t have those tools in place to do the automatic filtering. That’s what’s, I think, the glut of production that’s happening with code generation does not match the AI filtering for the systems that are in place for the human stuff, like the human code, like the volunteer components the human web that has been created.
[00:38:49] Sé Reed: It doesn’t have the filters in place to, to balance out, isn’t using AI to combat AI yet. So that is really skewed. And I, chat, this GPT 0 thing, I think is part of that. I also read recently about this cool Endeavor initiative campaign, something that’s called the Algorithmic Justice League, and it’s a non profit that is working to educate people about the dangers of AI through art.
[00:39:24] Sé Reed: So I just thought that was really interesting in this in this context all. This
[00:39:34] Jason Cosper: it has come up over the past week or so, I’ve found that I’ve leaned on this meme a little bit and say and Tucker know what’s coming, but effectively, and I’ll put it up on screen here for the folks who are watching cla classic meme format of hard to swallow pills that if you think that AI replace programmers, you are maybe not that good at programming.
[00:40:08] Jason Cosper: And yeah, really,
[00:40:15] Sé Reed: really hard to do that. Ow, I’m giving myself a headache.
[00:40:19] Jason Tucker: Can it just write the JavaScript for me though? I don’t need it to do the PHP, but just the JavaScript. Could it just write the JavaScript?
[00:40:27] Sé Reed: Look, we’re all using
[00:40:28] Jason Tucker: that wrote JavaScript deeply?
[00:40:29] Sé Reed: We’re all using it. It’s just tools. The tools are just getting to the point where it’s enabling the tools. We’ve got tools enabling the tools, and we’re using the tools, but we need to use the tools to fight the tools. You know what I’m saying?
[00:40:44] Jason Tucker: write this, but with vanilla JavaScript? It’s sure. No problem.
[00:40:48]
[00:40:48] Sé Reed: Can JavaScript, but put it in old English? That would be great.
[00:40:53] Jason Tucker: I’ve found this jQuery, but could you just do this?
[00:40:56] Sé Reed: Hey, at least you can ask ChatGPT to change your naming conventions, right? You can be like, make sure that none of this matches the core naming conventions of the rest
[00:41:07] Jason Tucker: Yeah. Yeah. Make sure the namespace is clean. Yep.
[00:41:10] Sé Reed: say. Fix your namespaces, you have no excuses anymore.
[00:41:16] Sé Reed: Anyway, I keep trying to like, paint the future of our world, of tech world, of WordPress world, as not bleak. I don’t know who I’m trying to paint that for. I paint it for myself. But I I guess at the end of the day, I feel like if we just keep talking about it You know then at least we know what’s happening to us.
[00:41:39]
[00:41:39] Sé Reed: I’m trying to spin it positively. Did that help? Was that something? I don’t know. The robots are coming. There’s mushrooms growing on frogs. We’re all gonna be zombies.
[00:41:51] Jason Tucker: The robots are
[00:41:55] Sé Reed: robots are here. They’ve got evil overlords operating them.
[00:41:59] Jason Tucker: They’re
[00:42:00] Sé Reed: All the evil overlords are firing everybody. I think we need some ghosts of Christmas past and future Yeah, the Are dystopia is already here. It’s just not evenly distributed yet, right?
[00:42:16] Sé Reed: Oh, look, another t shirt! We gotta do this. We keep talking about this, but oh, is that a quote from somebody?
[00:42:25] Jason Cosper: technically it’s a mishmash of a William Gibson quote.
[00:42:31] Sé Reed: Oh I support a mishmash, as we are here in a mishmash nest. Hey, come chat with us about the end of the world in our Discord.
[00:42:40] Jason Tucker: Yeah, please do.
[00:42:43] Sé Reed: And occasionally we play some mini golf.
[00:42:46] Jason Tucker: And sometimes the invites do expire and we do have to go and update them again on the website. So if you tried to get on before and you weren’t able to, it’s open. Feel
[00:42:55] Sé Reed: Yeah, but also, we’re looking at you.
[00:42:58] Jason Tucker: Yes. Yes.
[00:43:00] Sé Reed: You have to introduce yourself. There’s no, if you’re in there, you’re lucky. But if you’re coming now, you better just bring the real you. With none of the, none of these agents, no agents allowed.
[00:43:12] Jason Tucker: Yeah. And if you do show up, let us know what episode you were watching and that you you came by and hung out with us. Cause that, that’d be great. It’s, it’d be good to know,
[00:43:22] Sé Reed: Tell us what wacky thing we said inspired you to join our,
[00:43:27]
[00:43:27] Sé Reed: But we don’t have,
[00:43:29] Jason Tucker: Sé said?
[00:43:31] Sé Reed: we don’t have cookies, but we do have an F you pay me channel. Yes, that’s true.
[00:43:36] Sé Reed: we got stuff. See
[00:43:38] Jason Tucker: With that being said,
[00:43:39] Sé Reed: you there.
[00:43:40] Jason Tucker: hanging out with us. I really appreciate it. Talk to y’all later. See you in the Discord.
[00:43:44] Sé Reed: Stay human!
[00:43:49] Jason Tucker: Go over to our website at wpwatercooler. com slash subscribe and subscribe to our content over there. You can also find our links to our Discord over there on our website as well. Talk to y’all later. You have a good one. Bye bye.
[00:44:03] Sé Reed: Happy Friday! Enjoy your weekend!
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