When AI Is Unavailable

A generation that does not produce a result always says why, in one of a small set of messages. They mean genuinely different things: one is a license question, one is a billing question, and the rest are the service or the request itself. This page lists each message as the product words it, so you can tell them apart at a glance instead of guessing.

The Service Could Not Answer

AI is temporarily unavailable. Please try again shortly.

The Canvas AI service could not be reached from your site, or it answered in a form your site could not read. It is not a license problem and it is not a credit problem, and Canvas is careful to keep it separate from both: an outage never turns into a request to buy something.

Wait a minute and try again. If it persists, check that your host allows outbound connections from WordPress, because a server that blocks them stops updates and demo imports too.

Too Many Requests At Once

Too many requests. Please wait a moment and try again.

You, or someone else on the same license, generated more in quick succession than the service accepts. Pause for a moment and continue; nothing you had written in the dialog is lost.

The Result Was Unusable

Generation failed. Please try again.

The service answered, but with nothing the dialog could show: no text, or an image it could not read. Regenerate. If it happens repeatedly with the same description, reword the description, because an instruction the service refuses to act on lands here.

Image generation has three more specific versions of the same outcome, all worth regenerating rather than diagnosing:

The AI service returned an unsupported image type.
The AI service returned an unreadable image.
Could not create a temporary file for the generated image, or Could not write the generated image to disk, which are the two that are about your own server rather than the service. They mean WordPress could not write to its uploads folder, which stops ordinary uploads as well, so fix it there.

The Request Was Incomplete

Please enter a prompt first.

You chose Generate without describing anything. In the block editor the button stays unavailable until there is a description, so this appears in the admin dialogs, where the button is always live. The equivalents from the server read Please describe what you would like to generate and Please describe the image you would like to generate.

A License Is Needed

License Required A valid Canvas license is required for premium features to render on the front end.

The site has no active license. The AI controls stay visible, because they are also the way in to activating: choosing one opens this notice with Activate License and Get a License. Above those buttons sits a checklist headed Activating a license unlocks, naming the five things a license carries, so the notice answers what you would be buying rather than only refusing you. An expired license shows License Expired, heads its checklist Renewing restores, and offers Renew License instead.

There is a second, rarer form of the same refusal, worded for the feature rather than the site:

License Required An active Canvas license is required to generate with AI.

That one appears when your site believes its license is fine but the service disagrees, which usually means the key was deactivated or moved elsewhere. View Licensing opens the license screen, where the real status is shown.

Credits And Plans covers what an unlicensed site sees in more detail, and How To Activate Your License covers the fix.

The Month's Credits Are Gone

AI Credits Used Up

Not a fault. The month's allowance for that kind of generation is spent, and the notice names the reset date. Text and images have separate allowances, so the other one is probably still working. Credits And Plans has the whole picture.

Pitfalls

The dialog will not open at all. On a site without an active license the AI buttons open the license notice instead of the dialog, by design. There is no broken dialog to fix; activate and it opens.

Nothing happens when the AI button is chosen on an admin screen. The dialogs outside the block editor are built on the browser's own dialog element. A browser too old to support it shows nothing rather than a form that cannot be closed, so update the browser.

The usage chip disappeared but generation works. The balance and the generation are separate requests. When the balance cannot be read the chip is hidden rather than guessed at, and generating still works.

An outage looks like a paywall. It should never look like one. If a message asking you to upgrade appears while your license is active and in date, check the license screen: the service is answering that your key is not currently entitled, which is a license state question rather than an outage.

Everything fails on one site of a network. Generation resolves the license per site. A subsite covered by a network license generates; a subsite whose own license was deactivated does not, even though its neighbour works.