Artificial Creativity, Not Intelligence: My Notes from Brian Alvey’s WordPress VIP Vision

Brian Alvey’s recent talk has been on my mind for a week — not because it taught me something new, but because it put into words a lot of what we have been telling clients for years. He is the CTO of WordPress VIP, the enterprise arm of WordPress that hosts the likes of NASA and The White House, and a 25-year veteran of digital publishing. When someone with that vantage point articulates an idea you have already been living, you take notes. Not to change course — to sharpen how you say it. One line in particular did exactly that:

“This is not artificial intelligence. It is artificial creativity.”

If you run a WordPress agency, a publisher, or any brand that lives on a CMS, that single reframing is worth chewing on. Here is what stood out to me — and why it lines up with how we already think and work at The WP Clan.

Artificial creativity, not intelligence

For years the AI debate has been stuck on “can it think?” Alvey moves the conversation somewhere more useful: today’s AI tools — especially large language models — are not wrestling with our logic. They are walking into the most uniquely human room we have, the creative one, and rearranging the furniture. That is why this wave feels different from what came before. It is different. It is the first technology that competes with us on creative ground, not just analytical ground.

The question for everyone — me included — is not “will AI replace me?” anymore. It is: what is my uniquely human contribution in this new mix, and how do I double down on it? That has been the question we ask in every client kickoff, long before LLMs. Now it has a sharper edge.

The equalising waves

Alvey has watched every major equalising wave hit the web. Open source in the 90s. The web itself in the early 2000s. Cloud computing in the 2010s. Mobile right after. And now AI. Each wave knocked down a barrier and let smaller players go toe-to-toe with giants.

From where I sit, building WordPress and WooCommerce sites for clients in the US, AI is by far the most aggressive equaliser I have seen — and I have been working in this field since the CD-ROM era. The two-person agency is now shipping work the twenty-person team used to charge a premium for. That is exciting and uncomfortable in equal measure, and exactly why nobody feels caught up. Alvey nailed it: every single client he meets feels like they are doing just enough AI to stay behind.

Publishers vs marketers — pick a side

One of the most useful frames in the talk was how WordPress VIP splits its client base roughly down the middle:

• Publishers and media — where content is the product. Every uncontrolled bot is lost revenue, so they want scraping blocked, paywalls intact, and AI crawlers locked out unless there is a deal in place.
• Marketers and enterprise brands — where content is a means to an end. Every bot that touches their content is reach, citation, and a future buyer in some funnel, so they roll out the red carpet.

Most of the WordPress sites I audit are trying to do both at once. That is exactly why their robots.txt, llms.txt, and AI crawler policy look like a committee wrote them. Decide which side of that line your business is on first. The technical decisions follow naturally after that — and we have been opening every client conversation with this question for years.

Trust is peace of mind

Alvey describes what VIP really sells in two words: peace of mind. Clients pay them to stay online during the moments that actually matter — election nights, product launches, breaking news. There is a great line about hosting next to NASA and the White House: you get to move into a gated community whose security perks you did not even buy.

That is exactly how we describe what we sell at The WP Clan. Maintenance, SEO, WooCommerce builds — that is the marketing. What clients are actually buying is the feeling that they do not have to worry. The spec sheet sells the meeting; the calm closes the contract.

Codify the workflow, then dial the mix

This is the part most people miss — and it is the part that does not surprise me at all. Alvey’s bet on the future of work is not “we will all use ChatGPT more.” It is that every micro-decision in your business gets documented, codified, and represented digitally. Checklists. Governance plugins. Editorial workflows. Brand rules. Once it is all written down, you can dial the mix between human and bot per task. That is how you scale efficiently without losing your brand.

The agencies and publishers that map their own processes first will be the ones that scale fastest with AI. Not the ones with the cleverest prompts. We have been operating on that principle for two decades. AI did not invent the need for written process — it just raised the cost of not having one.

The four-day rebuild

Alvey casually mentions rebuilding a complex six-year project in four days as a WordPress plugin, using AI “bots.” The lesson is not “AI makes you 500× faster.” The real lesson is that the cost of trying something has collapsed. Prototypes that used to need funding and a six-person team are now a weekend.

If you run an agency, a SaaS, or an internal product team, this changes how often you should be experimenting — by an order of magnitude. The constraint stopped being engineering hours. It is now your imagination, your taste, and how clearly your process is written down so that AI can plug into the right step without breaking the rest.

Legacy brands survive by knowing who they are

When Alvey talks about how legacy brands survive technological change, he keeps coming back to fundamentals: obsessing over your core customers, adapting your distribution channels, and keeping a direct relationship with your audience. I would push that further. In the AI era, owning a direct channel — email, RSS, your own dashboard, a paid app — is no longer optional. Every layer between you and your reader is being quietly rewritten by an LLM.

His framework “Content + Code = Conversions” is doing a lot of work in that sentence. Content alone does not convert anymore — there is too much of it. Code alone is invisible. The brands that win are the ones putting both together with intention.

Why this is how we already work at The WP Clan

None of this is a new direction for us. It is the direction we set up the agency around. For twenty years, the system at The WP Clan has run on the same discipline:

• Every meeting is minuted, and the minutes go into an archive that goes back two decades.
• Meeting notes are not the end of the meeting — they become task lists.
• Tasks are assigned to the right person with the right context, and work intake and handoff is a culture rather than an accident.
• Our processes are explicit and defined. Nothing critical lives only in someone’s head.

Alvey’s framing helps me say it more cleanly:

• We do not sell deliverables — we sell peace of mind. Clients buy us because they do not have to worry while AI rewrites the rules around them.
• We do not automate a process before we have mapped it. Plugin choices, governance rules, and the human-vs-bot mix only make sense once the map exists — and ours has been on the wall for years.
• We open every new engagement with the publisher-or-marketer question, because the entire AI and bot strategy bends around that one answer.

What is changing is not how we work. It is how much further the same discipline carries us now that AI can sit inside the workflow without breaking it. WordPress, with around 43% of the web and an open foundation, is in a remarkable position for this moment. The agencies and brands that earned the right to use it well — by writing their processes down, by obsessing over the customer, by keeping the calm — are the ones who will get the most out of the next wave. That has always been the bet here.