Artificial Intelligence Website Development

We are currently amidst a “gold-rush” in development of generative Artificial Intelligence, which are pieces of technology that can create never-before-seen content off of user input. Most recently, OpenAI and they’re revolutionary ChatGPT generative AI powered chatbot has been all over technology journals. With such exciting pieces of technology being developed, an interesting idea is how such technology can be leveraged to generate better, more interesting content for the web.

Websites Are Essential

It is no secret that a good website is essential for all businesses big or small. Not only does a website create a crucial online contact point with consumers ,but it also boosts both brand credibility and awareness. However, especially for smaller businesses, developing a website from scratch can be quite intimidating. From generating the design to developing the code and deploying it on the web, the process can be very demanding, and hiring a web designer can be expensive. This is where generative AI technology can come in to assist the development process.

AI Assisted Process

The first challenge you may face when developing a website is coming up with enticing aesthetics. Generative AI can provide assistance in this, as recent text to image technology have made great advances.

Midjourney is an example of such technology that can take text prompts to generate great visuals to fuel ideas for your website visuals. For example you may give Midjourney the prompt: “Sketch design of a modern website home page for an energy drink company, black and neon-green, navigation tab, contact button”. The generative AI will produce numerous visuals based on your prompt, which you can use as inspiration for generating interesting enticing visuals for your website.

AI Code Development

ChatGPT is a chatbot that has gained global attention due to its sophisticated responses. Another attractive point of ChatGPT is the fact that currently (at the time of writing), it is completely free to use on the OpenAI website. An interesting use of this chatbot in the website development process is to generate code templates which you can tweak and implement.

For example, you can feed it the following prompt: “Create html skeleton code for a website homepage with a drop down menu at the top of the screen. Make it compatible for mobile screens as well”, and you will receive working code that you can customise to fit the needs of your website. However, an important thing to note is that the generative AI is not perfect, and will therefore still require you  to make sure the code is accurate and secure.

In other words generative AI can be used to assist the development stage, but it still comes down to you to ensure the code is accurate and secure.

AI as a Guideline

As such the use of generative AI in web design is plethoric in potential, and can be a source of great inspiration and guidance. However, the key thing to note is that you will get the most out of such technology if you use it as a source of guidance rather than something you entrust the whole process to. As wonderful the content created by generative AI is, it still comes down to you as the human in control to ensure the accuracy and security of what you release to the web.

Written by William Hannah – LCF Intern