I’ve been thinking about how to cobble together three things: API access to OpenAI, a credit card and a server. With those, I’d build a WordPress plug-in that let OpenAI actually manage a WordPress site and analyze the data from the site’s operation.
Two interfaces. One would offer the AI suggestions. The other would monitor the actions it was taking. The data coming back from the site would be the second conversation, running through that second interface — telling the AI whether it was winning, by operating a new business and producing results, or losing.
Most of the plumbing already exists, which is what makes the idea tempting rather than merely fanciful. WordPress runs an enormous share of the web — W3Techs counted it on 43.1% of the websites it surveys at the start of this year. Its REST API “provides an interface for applications to interact with your WordPress site by sending and receiving data as JSON objects,” which is exactly the kind of door a model needs. And WordPress multisite lets one installation host many sites — in the project’s own words, “a collection of sites that all share the same WordPress installation core files.” None of that was built with an AI operator in mind. It suits one anyway.
Or would this be the moment the AI God got out of the bottle?
The question deserves better than a shrug. It also shouldn’t be allowed to end the conversation. Johnson, in Rasselas, gives the line to a mechanic defending his flying machine before a doubtful prince: “Nothing will ever be attempted if all possible objections must be first overcome.” That’s no license for carelessness, but it does mean the objection and the experiment can proceed together, with the monitor window open.
Be that as it may: the AI could launch 100 businesses a minute on a multisite WordPress instance, and simply tell me what it needed a human to arrange — because, right now, it can’t arrange those things itself.
Almost all of them would fail. A few might not. And the ones that didn’t would tell the second interface something worth knowing.
