28 April 2023

AI is blowing up the Internet. So, this seemed like a good time to share how our community members have been experimenting with AI.

AI in the Wagtail Community

If your head is spinning from all of the AI conversations that are happening across the tech industry right now, you're not alone. There are a lot of big conversations happening right now, so we thought it would be neat to highlight a few of the exciting things that folks in our community have created related to AI.

First up is Tom Dyson's talk Here Come the Robots, which he gave at DjangoCon US in 2018 long before Large Language Models. He provides a good overview of different types of machine learning that Django and Python developers can tap into. Also, his live demo of trying to get image recognition to identify a sloth in a tea cup had some hilarious results. Image recognition has come a long way since that presentation.

Watch Here Come the Robots on YouTube

Next, let's have a closer look at a cool package that hooks LLM capabilities into Wagtail. We connected recently with Tom Usher, the package maintainer, to find out a bit more about why he was inspired to create the package and what type of problems it solves.

Read the full interview with Tom on wagtail-ai

Finally, here are two other Wagtail packages that offer options to incorporate AI into your Wagtail project:

• wagtail-localize: With wagtail-localize, you can incorporate machine learning translations to translate content in your Wagtail project from one language to another. There are options for incorporating Google Cloud Translation, DeepL, and Pontoon.
• wagtail-alt-generator: This package is great if you want to use image recognition to save yourself a bit of time while tagging photos. You can choose to use Azure Cognitive Services, AWS Rekognition, or Google Vision.

Are you experimenting with AI? Definitely come tell us about it in the #watercooler channel on Slack.

New Spotlight series on Wagtail.org

The interview with Tom Usher about wagtail-ai is the first post in what will hopefully become an ongoing series highlighting package maintainers, code contributors, and all the other wonderful contributions being made to Wagtail by our community members.

If you would like to nominate something or someone to be spotlighted in this series, please reach out to Meagen Voss through our Slack community or through the general Wagtail email. You're also welcome to post any cool things you find in the #twiw channel in Slack.

Latest chirps

• AI and Innovation at Torchbox: Here are some initial thoughts and experiments from Torchbox looking at how AI will lead to innovation in content management.
• The EU's Proposed CRA Law: The Python Foundation has flagged some potentially troublesome provisions in the new CRA law that everyone in the open source community should be aware of.
• Need ideas for a DjangoCon US talk?: This post has some great talk ideas for submitting proposals to DjangoCon US, and we'll just add that it would be GREAT to see folks submit talks about Wagtail. 😉

Until next time, thank you for reading! If you have a news item to contribute or a package release to report, please reach out to us through the Slack community or email us.

Need help with Wagtail? Find it here.