The new AI-powered website builder tool announced by Wix will allow Wix users to describe their intent and generate a website with a homepage, internal pages, text and images, as well as business-specific sections such as events and reservations. Avishai Abrahami, co-founder and chief executive of Wix, said the goal is to provide "real value" to customers as they build their websites and grow their businesses.
"AI Website Builder leverages our domain expertise and nearly a decade of AI experience to fine-tune the model to generate high-quality content, tailored designs and layouts," Abrahami said. "We ran many tests and had multiple in-depth conversations with users to ensure we were delivering real value. That's why we're choosing to do it now."
The AI Site Generator may be Wix's most ambitious AI experiment yet, but it's not the company's first. Wix's recently launched text creator hits ChatGPT, which enables users to generate personalized content for specific parts of a website. At the same time, its AI template text creator generates all the text for a given website. There's also the AI Domain Generator for Brainstorm Domains, which sits alongside Wix's suite of AI image editing, tweaking, and creation tools.
The way Abrahami said it, Wix didn't jump on AI because it's the current darling of Silicon Valley. He sees this technology as a real way to simplify and streamline the process of building back-end business functions, infrastructure, payment functions, etc. for clients' websites.
Abrahami's point is that small businesses in particular have difficulty launching and maintaining a website, which can cause them to miss out on revenue opportunities. A 2022 survey by Top Design Firms, the directory to find creative agencies, found that nearly 27% of small businesses still don’t have a website, with low traffic, subsequent adding “advanced” features and cost, the top challenges facing their websites.
The AI site generator takes a few cues—any description of the site—and uses a combination of in-house and third-party AI systems to create the envisioned website. In a chatbot-like interface, the tool asks a series of questions about the website and the nature of the business, and attempts to convert it into a custom web template.
ChatGPT generates text for websites, while Wix's artificial intelligence creates website designs and images.
Other platforms, like SpeedyBrand, recently profiled by TechCrunch, have accomplished something. But what makes AI Site Generator unique, Wix claims, is that it can automatically build e-commerce, scheduling, food ordering, and event ticketing components based on customer specifications and requests.
“Using AI Site Generator, users will be able to create a complete website with a design that fits the content, rather than a template where the content fits the design,” Abrahami said. “This results in a unique website that maximizes the content-related experience.”
Clients aren't limited to AI Site Generator designs, a not-so-subtle acknowledgment that AI can't replace human designers -- assuming it gets there. Wix’s full suite of editing tools—both manual and AI-powered—is available to AI website builder users, letting them make tweaks and changes as needed.
New editing-focused features will also be rolled out alongside AI website builders, such as the AI Page and Section Creator, which lets customers add new pages or sections to a website simply by describing their needs. The upcoming Object Eraser will allow users to extract objects from images and manipulate them, while the new AI Assistant tool will suggest website improvements (such as adding products or changing the design) and create personalized strategies based on analytics and website trends.
“The current AI revolution is only just beginning to unlock the true potential of AI,” Abrahami said. “We believe AI can reduce complexity and create value for our users, and we will continue to be trailblazers.”
But there are reasons to be wary of technology.
As The Verge's James Vincent wrote in a recent article, generative AI models are changing the economics of the web — making it cheaper and easier to generate low-quality content. Newsguard, a company that provides tools to censor news sources, has exposed hundreds of ad-supported websites with generic-sounding names that feature misinformation generated by artificial intelligence.
Cheap AI content also has the potential to clog search engines -- something that future small businesses almost certainly don't want. Models like ChatGPT excel at crafting SEO-friendly marketing copy. But this kind of spam can often bury legitimate websites, especially those that don't have the means or know-how to optimize their content with the right keywords and patterns.
Even generative AI used with the best of intentions can go wrong. AI models can sometimes confidently make up facts or spit out toxic, insanely offensive statements due to a phenomenon known as "hallucination." Generative artificial intelligence has been shown to plagiarize copyrighted works.
So, what is Wix doing to combat all this? Abrahami didn't say specifically. But he stressed that Wix uses a plethora of tools to manage spam and abuse.
“Our AI solutions are tried and tested on quality data at scale, and we leverage knowledge gained from the usage and build workflows of hundreds of millions of websites,” Abrahami said. “We have many models, including AI, that can prevent and detect model abuse because we believe in creating a safe digital space that protects users’ fundamental rights. ChatGPT has an inherent model to prevent inappropriate content generation; we plan to use OpenAI’s moderation.”
Time will tell how successful the strategy turns out to be.