Leverage AI in WordPress

Let’s take a look at some AI tools available for integration directly into your WordPress site.

AI Engine

AI Engine is a rapidly developing WordPress plugin that can generate content right in the WordPress editor. The author of the plugin is Jordy Meow of Meow Apps fame. You will need to bring your own AI service for the plugin to leverage. AI Engine recommends OpenAI over Google.

AI Engine can generate titles and excerpts from the contents of a post with a single click. AI Engine also offers controls at the block level to adjust paragraph copy, or even generate an image from the paragraph text. Finally, AI Engine can generate text from a prompt—just start a new paragraph and press the spacebar to open the prompt input. These editing features are seamlessly integrated into the WordPress block editor, and I could see our team leveraging them often. 

AI Engine can also be used to create chatbots for users to interact with. The Pro version can make the chatbot aware of the current page content, or your site holistically. This is pretty much required for a useful chatbot, as without specific context the chatbot will be more or less vanilla ChatGPT, with no special knowledge about your business.

Jetpack

The Jetpack WordPress plugin has recently added an AI Assistant that can also enhance the editing experience. It can even generate lists and tables, which actually generates the correct WordPress blocks for semantic markup. You can also adjust paragraphs with a generic text prompt, rather than merely a set of predefined adjustments. You can also add a block after your last paragraph and ask the AI assistant to continue the article based on the preceding content. Overall, Jetpack AI is very impressive and provides an even better editing experience than AI Engine. AI Engine is more feature-rich than Jetpack since AI Engine has image generation and chatbot capabilities while Jetpack does not. The other difference is pricing. Jetpack AI is a fixed monthly cost with usage limitation, whereas AI Engine requires you to bring your own AI service, which usually is credit/usage-based. You could end up overpaying with Jetpack if you end up not using it very much.

Elementor

Elementor now has built-in controls to generate and modify text and images and even CSS code right in the editor. (You will be prompted to purchase an Elementor AI subscription when you first attempt to use the AI features.) These functions work well, though the UX is a little clunkier than AI Engine and Jetpack, mainly because the AI controls are slower and located in the left panel rather than in line with the text. But the main thing I wanted to try was the layout generator. Elementor AI can generate entire layouts that can be dropped right into your page.  This feature is marked as Beta right now, and I would agree that it doesn’t seem ready for prime time yet. For example, when you add the layout to your page, I would expect all the widgets to inherit the default fonts and colors from your Elementor global styles, but instead, it uses preset fonts and colors that are not part of your global styles. Also, it seems like it’s merely searching through a bunch of layouts in Elementor’s database and returning one that matches your prompt rather than actually “generating” a layout. The feature has a lot of potential for content writers working in Elementor, and with some improvement, it could be a game-changer, but for now, I don’t think this will be very useful to our team.

Conclusion

If you use the block editor, I highly recommend Jetpack AI. The enhancements to the block editor definitely improve the overall editing experience. If you add content infrequently, AI Engine might make more sense from a billing perspective, and it also gives you control of what AI service and model to use, whereas Jetpack and Elementor do not tell you which model they are using. The UX of Elementor AI is not as good as Jetpack or AI Engine, and the layout generation doesn’t work that well. Hopefully, it will improve in the future.