Generative AI poses an existential threat to **. This begs the question: is it still important? Drupal's founder, Dries Buytaert, thinks so!
Translated from Drupal Creator: Websites Needed More Than Ever in the AI Era, by Richard Macmanus is a senior editor at The New Stack and writes about web and application development trends. Previously, he founded ReadWriteWeb in 2003 and built it into one of the world's most influential tech news**. From the early days. The last time I spoke with Drupal founder Dries Buytaert was in October 2022, and our focus was on headless content management systems – a hot topic in web development at the time. But since then, a lot has changed: j**ascript frameworks have become more complex, jamstack is no longer a hot word, and of course, generative AI has emerged. These are not necessarily positive trends for the web. In fact, some might say that the threat is greater now than at any time in the history of the web. In the 2010s, it seemed that smartphone apps and app stores might have beaten the web, but by the end of that decade, web developers had successfully fought back by using advanced technologies such as Jaascript, WebAssembly, and Web components. And now, in the early 2020s, generative AI is quickly becoming the new existential threat. This begs the question....
In his review of 2023 for Acquia, a SaaS platform built for its open-source (and browser-based) Drupal software, Buytaert points out the dangers and opportunities of the Web moving forward. "On the one hand, the rise of AI in information gathering will reduce the need for tradition," he wrote. "On the other hand, the decline of business networking and the shift to a cookieless future suggest that the future will continue to be important, and perhaps even more so. Buytaert said of the fate of **: "I think it's positive. He then pointed out, somewhat surprisingly, that Google's plan to retire third-party cookies by the end of 2024 is an opportunity for the web. "This means that the marketing team is no longer as detailed with the user's information," he said. "So that means they need to learn more about the user themselves. They can't track users on the web, so they need to direct people to their own digital attributes – and really engage with them to understand their behaviors, intentions, and desires. So it's good for open networks. I think that's good for privacy, and obviously, the disappearance of third-party cookies also means that marketers and organizations will invest more in their own **.
He has a similar view on the impact of ChatGPT and other generative AI tools. He admits that AI can lead to a drop in organic traffic, as tools like ChatGPT are designed to answer search queries directly. But he argues that it's just a way to force developers and owners to make their claims more attractive.
You have to offer value beyond what ChatGPT can offer so that people are still motivated to visit your**. So how do you do it? By providing better content – better content may be personalized content, or [...]It could also be that more content was put on....It doesn't have to be a paywall, but there are some thresholds. You know, maybe you need to sign up to get the content. ”
Another factor driving people back to building the web is the rapid deterioration of user experience on centralized social platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. This led to the rise of the fevaried universe, in which the open web was the key foundation, implemented primarily through the World Wide Web Consortium's ActivityPub specification. Buytaert noted that Drupal has supported the independent network movement for the past decade, which he said extends to the federal universe as well. "You just install a module, we call it a plugin, and it's going to connect your blog or ** to the Federated Universe, automatically pull content and push content to the Federated Universe – all those things. We've had this feature for a long time. ”
I've noticed recent objections from the web developer community to the increasing complexity of the j**ascript framework. Matt Biilmann, CEO of Netlify, created "Jamstack" in 2016 and most recently at TheJamWhile decoupling the front-end from the back-end is a positive development, there is now "pressure to twist everything into the front-end – to] reframe the whole at this front-end layer", according to the Dev virtual meeting. I asked Buytaert for his thoughts on the current front-end complexity.
The common denominator of all these platforms is that they start simple and then people want to use them for more complex use cases," he said. This has led to what Buytaert calls a "slow evolution" towards more complex architectures. Using content previews as an example, he points out that Jamstack didn't have this feature in the first place, because it was easier to enter the content into a markdown file and then build it using a static site generator. The problem is that users don't necessarily want to write in markdown. So this prompted Jamstack developers to make a request to create a custom preview feature, or to integrate with a headless CMS product that offers visual editing (when I tried JamStack in early 2020, I used a product called Forestry, now called Tinacms) for this reason). "I think Jamstack has largely evolved into [...]I call them traditional CMSs," says Buytaert, "and they can do all the same things — you know, content previews are a great example of that." This is a feature that we have been doing for two decades in Drupal, right? And any CMS actually has it, and it's not just a Drupal thing. ”
However, he admits that Drupal itself has undergone an evolution from simple to complex. Today, Buytaert and its company, Acquia, refer to Drupal as a "Digital Experience Platform" (DXP), so it has grown far beyond its beginnings as an amateur CMS in the early 2000s. "Drupal has evolved from a side project in my dorm room to an enterprise-grade content management system," Buytaert told me. "So I'm not necessarily against this evolution. It's definitely good for Drupal, and I can imagine it good for Jamstack in a lot of ways as well. But as you do that, [.].You'll attract new users and weed out old ones. You lose amateurs, but you gain business users. It's a choice you make. ”
Finally, I asked Drupal how it fits into the trend of generative AI. Buytaert replied that Acquia has added the Genai feature to all of its products, including Drupal. About 90 percent of this feature, he says, is a "low-hanging fruit" that helps with content production.
We use it for things like summarizing content, suggesting titles for content or posts, and more. We use it to translate content into different languages. We use it to generate alt text to make images accessible. We use it for auto-tagging and auto-categorization of content. We're starting to see it in application in search. ”
But he said the goal for 2024 is to go beyond "these relatively simple content creation use cases." The plan is to use AI as the user interface for your CMS. He describes something similar to what I recently introduced to the design-to-**tool Locofy, which is automatically generated using AI. It looks like drupal is moving in this direction as well. "You can easily imagine the future where you can prompt like this, right? All you have to do is type: 'Create a two-column landing page, place a sign-up form with these fields in the left column of the layout' and get started. It may not be perfect, but it may easily eliminate 90% of the [work] and then you can just fine-tune it with a click. ”
He added that Acquia is also committed to "responsible AI," which includes preventing data leaks and allowing its customers to use their own LLMs.