Wix’s new AI chatbot builds websites in seconds based on prompts

You can now build a website, images and all, using only prompts in Wix’s new AI website builder. Creating a website is free, but you’ll have to upgrade to one of Wix’s premium plans if you want to do things like accept payments or don’t want to be limited to using a Wix domain name.

Wix’s prices range from $17 per month for the Light plan, which comes with things like 2GB of storage, support for two collaborators, and some basic marketing tools, to $159 for the Business Elite plan, which supports up to 15 collaborators and offers advanced analytics and e-commerce features.

To create a site, you’ll click on the “Create with AI” button and answer a few of the chatbot’s questions, like what you want to call the site, what it’s about, and what your goals are for it. Within a few seconds, it creates something for you. You can edit in more conventional ways after it’s created, tweaking the theme and layouts. There are also bits of AI sprinkled in here and there for prompting image and text creation. (Wix told The Verge when it announced the website generator last year that it was using “out of the box models” like DALL-E for this and OpenAI’s ChatGPT for text creation.)

I went ahead and took a crack at building a new tech website, The Vorge, that meets the description of The Verge’s “About” page:

The Verge is about technology and how it makes us feel. Founded in 2011, we offer our audience everything from breaking news to reviews to award-winning features and investigations, on our site, in video, and in podcasts.

Our original editorial insight was that technology had migrated from the far fringes of the culture to the absolute center as mobile technology created a new generation of digital consumers. Now, we live in a dazzling world of screens that has ushered in revolutions in media, transportation, and science. The future is arriving faster than ever.

Here’s what I got:

But it’s not The Vorge. I want The Vorge. Editing the theme, I described the futuristic technology news website I was looking for, and it responded:

I am creating your website with a space-like design theme. It features edgy elements with black and purple colors. The theme includes two font types: sans serif and bold, as well as dotted and stemmed icons. The site’s background will be changed to black as per your request. The logo will have a futuristic font and will be positioned at the top, tipped on its side, reading from the bottom-up, slightly overlapping the main image. The top of the page will have a large main story with a headline in a big font, also slightly overlapping the bottom right two-thirds of the main image for that story. It will also include a subhead and the author’s name underneath. To the right of this main story, there will be five other “Top Stories” with headlines, author names, and thumbnails of their main images.

It was at this point I realized that we are, in addition to being a tech news site, a hair salon (this is just a sample section, of course):

I did a little bit of tweaking to try to get to something like The Verge. Allow me to present the website that’s going to revolutionize online tech journalism (and hair salons): https://wes77521.wixsite.com/the-vorge

It’s clearly far from being the actual Verge. You’d probably need to delve into Wix’s advanced editing features and know things about actual web development for that. But it was very easy to use the basic AI generator to create something that looks close to a legitimate site to start with, making it much easier to get to a basic starting point.