Wix AI Websites
Have you tried an AI Website Builder? I have tried Wix's AI Website builder, and here's what I think about it:
Wix is one of several website builder platforms that is starting to offer AI website builders. I love the Wix platform, it's amazing WYSIWYG editor is a designer's dream, you can move and place elements anywhere on any webpage – there are no design limitations or clunky templates to have to design around. So, as a Wix website designer, I thought I'd try out their AI Website Builder tool to help me get started with building a website for a River Resort client in New Mexico. I provided the AI a brief summary of the resort, and this is one of the pages it generated – what's wrong with this picture? A geography lesson may be in order.
Well, first off, apparently Wix's AI does not know the difference between "New Mexico" and "Mexico." So we may need to train Wix's AI in a little geography so that it works better out of the gate. Sure, the design looks ok for the page and it's a decent starting point, but ALL of the images are beachy except for one, and are totally not applicable to the client. It's fine, as I am an experienced Wix website designer, so I will find replacements for all the images on the page, as well as rearrange and re-write the generic AI-generated copy to be more appropriate for my client. But this may be hard if you aren't a website designer – many people may struggle with finding images to swap out that work well in the proportions of the page, or rewriting the copy well for SEO. A good website designer can help source (or create) graphics, images and copy elements that work well in the website templates, which is a skill in itself. I also noticed that this Wix AI-created website that it has a copyright in the footer for 2035 by Seaside B&B – also, not a deal breaker, this could be easily changed in Wix's editor – but, why would it not at least use the name of the client I provided? And, why choose 2035, when it's 2023? This seems like more of the lack of intelligence to me – these are simple things that I would expect AI to do, otherwise, what's so different than just picking a template and customizing it? Where is the "artificial intelligence" coming in?
Overall, the AI-written copy isn't too bad, though it does seem to lean towards beach resort with it's references to sand volleyball courts. Luckily, it can be easily rewritten to work for the New Mexico river resort.
So what do I think of Wix's AI Website builder?
Right now, it's just ok, nothing to get excited about. Sure, it's a starting point – a "template," if you will. I believe that AI will become a tool that website designers like myself will use going forward to help begin projects. It certainly can create some pages to start with, but just like a template, you still need to customize nearly every aspect of the page. If using an AI website builder, it would be very important to review every detail on the page to make sure it's correct, so the website doesn't have strange or inappropriate AI-written copy, footer info, or images that have nothing to do with the brand or company. I think just like with Google and other search engines, we humans will "train" AI over time to become a lot more efficient. Google has learned a lot from tracking most all of our searches since 1998 – though humans have had a huge roll in guiding the Google supercomputer search engine beast to provide the best search results. I've tried other search platforms such as Duck Duck Go and Bing, and their search results are far less relevant to what I'm looking for than Google. Google almost seems to be able to read my mind these days, although not completely, yet. ;) It IS an incredible search engine though, and shows new content quickly, efficiently, and understands my searches better than any other search engine. At least now in 2023. Time will tell what other search engines rise to beat out Google. My biggest issue with Google results these days is that more and more of the results are "sponsored" ads – so the actual results are getting buried further and further down the page. But it is still an amazing search engine.
I am confident that the Wix AI Website builder will improve.
But, I am not sure how quickly Wix and all of the other AI tools out there will improve. I can't say that smartphones have come a long way in the past 10 years, I just did a voice-to-text message on my Google Pixel to a friend and it wrote it out as: "See you in August, Happy july!" ... what's wrong with that text? Well, "Happy" should not be capitalized after the comma, whereas "July" should be capitalized. I sent the text before I realized the basic grammar mistake so now I look foolish. Thanks Google Pixel. This is smartphone technology? Not so smart. I do hope they get smarter, the speech-to-text leaves a LOT to be desired, with it's swapping of inappropriate words and constant grammatical mistakes. But I guess you could say smartphones are still in their teenage years, what do we expect? haha
Just like with Google's search results, I think AI tools will definitely improve over time as all of us "beta" testers feed it with our requests and approvals/rejections – at some point Wix AI may really be able to design a pretty decent website that doesn't need much human modification to at least be proficient. But what I don't think AI will be able to do is match our human creativity, photographic/design experience, and even just life experience. Humans have the most sophisticated computers of all – our brains. We experience life and store millions of memories and tons of real-life information, and also come up with completely new ideas (when we're lucky.) Heck, we invented AI. We'll see how AI develops and if it can actually start to THINK logically and correct itself over time with our input. A big part of that depends on the humans programming (using) the AI tools. Google has had years of amazing humans making it what it is today – a Google computer didn't achieve all it has on it's own. I don't expect AI will replace humans for more sophisticated things like being creative, designing and coming up with new ideas – but it can certainly be a great tool to help us create a foundation (such as a website) to develop out with our human brains, skills and experience.
I'll post more Wix AI Websites here soon, stay tuned!
In the meantime, check out these Best Wix Websites* » (*designed by a human, not AI)
Last note: I've also dabbled with some other AI tools such Wix's AI Image Creator – where I put in "Butterfly on native flower" as the image description, and chose different styles, including Photo, Illustration, Cartoon, Painting and 3D, see some of the examples below:
I also tried out Shutterstock's AI image generator. I put in "new mexico river" and this is what it came back with:
and here is another example of AI generated images with "New Mexico River Resort":
hmmmm.... I'm not that impressed. None of these images are ones that I would use for this client. I'm sure in time with our input, the AI generated image results will improve. Stay tuned for more AI generated websites and images to come. I'm open minded, I'll try it ... but will I eventually like it? Time will tell.
December 2023 Update: I found another cool AI tool that generates some pretty fantastic images, one pictured above, check them out in my another one of my AI posts: Fun with AI Ending with a little humor ...
