Canvas Docs

What Canvas AI Does

Canvas AI writes copy and makes images where the content lives: on the field you are filling, on the block you have selected, on the exact words you have highlighted. There is no separate AI screen to visit and paste back from. This page explains the three places its controls appear, what generating and enhancing each mean, and where the feature stops, so you know what to expect before you open your first dialog.

The Three Places It Appears

Canvas AI surfaces in three places, each scoped to what you have in front of you:

  • Beside a field. Fields in a block's settings that hold visitor facing words or images carry a small AI button under the control. It fills that one field. Fields holding a size, a link, a class or a setting never carry one, which Where The AI Button Appears explains in full.
  • On the block toolbar. A selected block shows a Canvas AI menu offering Generate text, Enhance text and, on a block that holds an image, Generate image.
  • On a selection. Highlight a passage inside any text block and the formatting menu offers Enhance with Canvas AI, which rewrites those words and leaves everything around them untouched.

Images have a fourth route of their own, the Generate with AI tab in the media library, covered in Generating Images.

Here is the first of them, the button sitting under the fields of a Canvas Icon Box:

The Canvas Icon Box settings in the block editor sidebar, with the AI button under the Subtitle, Title, Description and Call-to-Action Text fields

Generate Or Enhance

Every surface opens the same dialog, and that dialog does one of two jobs:

  • Generate writes something new from your description. Use it on an empty field, or when what is there should be replaced by a different idea rather than a better version of the same one.
  • Enhance improves text that already exists. It is given the current words as its starting point, so it tightens, rephrases or lengthens what you wrote instead of inventing a new subject.

Where a field already holds content, the dialog offers both as a What to do choice: Write something new or Improve the current text. Enhance text on the block toolbar is unavailable while the block has no text to work on, because there is nothing to improve yet.

The Output Is Yours To Edit

Nothing reaches your page until you say so. A text result arrives in an editable Suggestion box: change a word, cut a sentence, then choose Replace to swap it in, Insert to add it after what is already there, or Copy to take it somewhere else. Regenerate tries again. Closing the dialog leaves the page exactly as you found it, so opening one is always safe.

An image behaves the same way. It previews in the dialog, opens full size when you want a closer look, and only enters your media library when you accept it. From that point it is an ordinary attachment: rename it, edit it, crop it, reuse it on other pages.

Treat every result as a first draft written by someone who has read your site and nothing else. It does not know your prices, your opening hours or your team, so check anything factual before you publish it.

What It Does Not Do

Knowing the edges saves time:

  • It fills one thing at a time. A field, a block's text, a selection, one image. There is no instruction that builds a whole page.
  • It never publishes. No generation writes to your site until you accept it, and no generation touches a post that is not open in front of you.
  • It cannot see your design. Canvas describes your site to it in words, not pictures: the site name and tagline, your brand profile, the page title and a short digest of the content already on the page. It has never seen your layout, your photographs or your fonts.
  • It works from a summary, not the whole page. Long pages are shortened before they travel, so a generation on a very long page is written against the opening of it.
  • It needs a license and a connection. Generation runs through the Canvas service, so an unlicensed site or a site that cannot reach the service shows a notice instead of a result. Credits And Plans and When AI Is Unavailable cover both.

Note

Contact details are removed from the page digest before it leaves your site, so an email address or a phone number sitting in your content is not sent along as context.

How To Turn Canvas AI Off

Open Canvas > Theme Options > AI > AI Settings, switch off Enable AI Generation and click Save Options. Every Generate with AI control disappears from the editor, the media library and Theme Options, and the site stops contacting the Canvas AI service entirely. Your brand profile is kept, so switching the setting back on restores everything as it was.

Leave it on if anyone on the site uses AI, because each generation is only ever sent when someone clicks generate. The suggested text Canvas adds to Settings > Privacy lists exactly what a generation sends, so you can describe it in your privacy policy.

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