Global SaaS and website creation platform Wix Ltd. will release an AI Site Generator that allows people to create websites using only natural language artificial intelligence prompts. The generator will include a suite of AI-powered capabilities, many of which Wix is already offering as part of its template-based site-building framework. The package “significantly streamlines the entire website-building, design and management process,” offering automated tools that provide the opportunity for Wix users to “operationalize and grow their businesses with never-before-seen ease,” the company co-founder and CEO Avishai Abrahami said.

Abrahami said in a news announcement that these new tools will “ultimately drive forward the next generation of website creation,” though he didn’t share a timeline other than to say the AI Site Generator is “coming soon.”

Its capabilities will “instantly generate” a custom website “complete with a homepage and all inner pages with text, images, and any business solution including Stores, Bookings, Restaurants, Events and more,” the announcement explains, noting “users can continue to customize the site and edit based on their needs with integrated AI tools.”

Among the upcoming AI features:

• AI Assistant that will suggest improved businesses practices and “create individualized strategies based on analytics and site trends.”
• AI Page and Section Creator to let users quickly “generate the layout, design and text” when adding a new page or section to a website.
• Object Eraser that offers photo manipulation capabilities “to seamlessly extract subjects from images and manipulate them.”

After watching a YouTube instructional video produced by Wix that touts the AI Site Generator, The Verge reports “it’ll let you create entire websites by typing a description into a box and answering a few follow-up questions. Everything, from the design to text and images, will then be automatically generated for you, and from the looks of things, it’ll be pretty fast.”

While OpenAI’s ChatGPT is used to generate textual content, Wix’s own AI models handle graphics and coding, according to The Verge, which says the new platform “could make website building more approachable than it’s ever been.”

In a blog post musing on the Wix path to AI that began in 2016, Abrahami details the new capabilities and recounts what has already been released (the latter including a text creator and domain name generator).

TechCrunch points out that Wix customers who use AI Site Generator can add manual customizations using “the full suite of Wix editing tools, both manual and AI-driven,” noting that as “a not-so-subtle acknowledgement that AI isn’t at the point where it can replace human designers — assuming it ever gets there.”