While most people have heard of AI, generative AI is a newer innovation and much less familiar. The key difference between them is the word generative. Generative AI is an artificial intelligence that can create everything from text and images to videos and computer code and do so on demand. As such, it offers incredible potential for all kinds of businesses. In this post, we take a closer look at generative AI and its potential use for website owners.
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How does generative AI work?
Many people already have experience of using generative AI, some without even realising it. Anyone who types a question into Google today will find not just a list of websites where they can find the answer, but above them, an AI-generated response from Gemini, Google’s AI. If you use the Edge browser, you’ll get a similar response from Microsoft’s Copilot AI. Whether it’s using these browsers or interacting with Chat-GPT or any other AI, the front-end experience is very simple, tell the AI what you want it to do (you can use text or speech) and in most cases, it will do it.
So how can a simple interface generate such an extraordinary range of things or carry out highly complex actions, some requiring incredible depth of knowledge or experience, instantly, at the touch of a button? Several things underpin this. First and foremost, AI has access to vast amounts of data. For massive models like ChatGPT, Gemini and Copilot, if data is publicly available in digital form, the chances are that these models will have access to it. Other models use more focused but still extensive datasets. This is the source of generative AI’s in-depth knowledge – and it is immense. To make use of that data, the AI models are trained to learn patterns from the diverse range of data sets that they have access to. This enables them to give accurate responses to human requests and do so with increasing creativity. Two vital components here are natural language processing (NLP) which enables AIs to communicate with humans, and machine learning (ML) which enables AIs to learn from their own activities.
While this may seem advanced, now, it’s important to understand that in terms of its evolution, generative AI is still very much in its infancy.
How generative AI benefits website owners
There are numerous ways website owners can benefit from using generative AI. One of the most obvious is to create written content for websites. In terms of application, generative AI can be used to create web pages, blog content, product descriptions, emails, newsletters and marketing materials. It can also be tasked with optimising these forms of content for search engines, by including important keywords. Indeed, it can even provide keyword suggestions, create meta descriptions and generate content calendars.
However, there is a proviso when using AI for these purposes. As it relies on pre-existing data, what you are provided with will not have original ideas. Nor will it be written in the house style of your website. Moreover, as AI providers clearly state, generative AI can make factual mistakes. So, while it can save your content writers time, what it produces will need fact-checking and adapting for your website, especially if you want originality and authenticity. In this sense, while AI can certainly assist professionals, it cannot, as yet, replace them.
The latest generative AI models are also multi-modal, meaning they can interpret and create other types of content. Show them a photo of a food dish and they will be able to tell you the ingredients and how to cook it. Describe something and they can create a picture of it, put it in a video or create a piece of music for it. For website owners, this makes it easier than ever to create visual and other media content for your website, like images and infographics, saving significant amounts of time and money.
Another potential benefit comes from generative AI’s ability to write computer code. Potentially, this means you can create websites, themes and plugins to your exact requirements without the need to hire expensive web designers. However, while it can generate code in different programming languages, its code-writing skills aren’t as yet infallible, so you cannot assume that what it generates is a fully functioning, bugless and vulnerability-free piece of software. You will need to thoroughly test any websites using AI-generated code in sandbox environments first.
Take your marketing further, read: How AI is Transforming Online Marketing
International businesses can also make use of generative AI’s multi-lingual skills to translate web content into different languages for overseas customers, enabling you to create different websites for different countries without the need for a professional translator. What’s more, as its natural language processing skills evolve, AI will also be able to have deeper and more meaningful conversations. For website owners, this means chatbots will be able to do much more than they are currently capable of. The eagerly anticipated ChatGPT-5 is expected to be able to understand context over longer conversations, remembering earlier details so it doesn’t lose the thread and can provide more relevant responses. This will also allow it to offer improved personalisation, based on users’ prior interactions, preferences, needs and intentions. In this sense, it opens the doors to websites having personal assistants, personal shoppers, fully automated customer service and even letting education websites deploy AI tutors.
This level of contextual understanding, combined with generative AI’s ability to create content quickly, means that advanced dynamic websites may soon be able to create content specifically for individual users. For instance, generating text, images and video on demand to meet the interests of an individual user. This would take product recommendation engines to the next level in terms of what is recommended and how it is presented to the visitor.
Take a glimpse of the future, read: How Visual AI is Reshaping eCommerce
Making use of generative AI
While some of the use cases above can be achieved simply by visiting an online generative AI provider and typing in your requests, others will require you to integrate AI tools into your website. This may mean making use of AI SaaS solutions that connect your website via an API or installing and operating an AI model on your server. You may also need to train the AI model with the data you want to use and ensure its output matches the needs of your brand. If you run a funeral director website, for instance, you won’t want your AI cracking jokes for your visitors.
You may also need to consider how using AI will affect your hosting needs. If you are using it to create dynamic content, then the amount of data you will need to store and process could rise dramatically. Most businesses that deploy AI do so in the cloud as it offers the scalability AI models need to process large datasets and generate new content.
Find out more about the cloud and AI, read: AI and Web Hosting – a Match Made in the Cloud
Conclusion
Although still a fledgling technology, generative AI is set to transform how website owners create content, whether that’s getting it to write web pages and emails or converse with and create dynamic, personalised content for individuals. Sooner or later, all websites will be making use of it. Hopefully, from reading this article, you’ll have a clearer understanding of what generative AI is and its current and potential future uses.
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