Sorry to say but I’m not happy with AI at this stage. You keep saying that you are a small team and therefore have to make choices about what to do and now you are going to put energy into something fancy while everyone is urgently waiting for the third party store. Why not put the energy in the store?
@Lalla, less than a week ago we published a post discussing the road ahead, we specifically touched on the store and why it’s taking longer than anticipated, the post explains everything in more detail.
As an aside, I’m interested to know why you urgently need the third-party store. Is there something missing from Elements that’s holding you up from completing your website?
While I congratulate the Realmac team on coming up with a unique and interesting way to deploy AI, I’m not a fan.
AI is backward-looking and pattern matching. When you apply AI to content you’re basically asking to regress to the mean. In a doom-scroll world, you don’t want to regress to the mean, as it means people scroll right on by.
This is an age-old content problem that we used to debate ad infinitum at newspapers and magazines. My wife, who was my copy editor, and I had constant arguments centered around this: do you edit to correctness or do you let unique voicing simply be unique and violate norms, and surprise? Generally, the latter won’t happen with AI writing tools.
And yes, it is measurable and important. Back in the 90’s we used to use one particular magazine as an example: the US Car & Driver. It had unique voices, that used unique style and languages, and constantly surprised. Cars are basically gear, and gear is just metal, glass, and plastic that has specs and performance that are both boring and ultimately mostly non-useful. Car & Driver, through its unique use of language applied to those one ton+ masses, gave both the masses, the magazine, and the audience style and personality that was unique.
Yes, you could type into an AI “rewrite this in the style of Car & Driver” now and get something that mimics CD at a specific time in the past, but that’s missing the point. Content is a living thing that needs to evolve, grow, and do new things.
It’s a bit of a different story for code and AI, which is one reason why I’d bet on Anthropic at the moment over some of the others: ultimately, the chips in our devices require regression to the mean, otherwise you get errors.
Again, Elements did a unique thing with writing AI. But that’s actually partly illustrating my point. Once all design products do the same thing, using that function will mostly regress all content writing to the mean. As someone who’s made a small fortune off of content over my lifetime, I’ll happily point out that I’m rarely regressing to the mean…
That’s a thoughtful take, and I get where you’re coming from.
Our goal with the Writing Assistant isn’t to replace someone’s unique voice, but to support it. Everything is opt-in, contextual, and fully editable, you stay in control of every change. If anything, we’re aiming to help people refine what they already have, not overwrite it.
Not everyone is a confident writer, and for many people getting words onto the page is one of the hardest parts of building a website. If we can lower that barrier and help people express their ideas more clearly, that’s a win. Used well, it should help give more people a voice, and surely that’s a great thing!
Good news everyone, the AI Writing Assistant is back up and running, please make sure you’ve upgrade to Elements 2.2.1 before working on your project!
I get it. Not everyone is as good a writer as I think I am ;~). And for many, the way you’ve implemented AI will work as a mostly reasonable copy editor. But I’d suggest people not lean on it too much. “Commonality” is not a good thing any more on the Internet, as it just places your content in the same category as everyone elses’.
Looks fantastic, and I’m excited to start using it! Quick question: will this also help in creating your color and font palette? I usually rely on AI to generate color and font combinations, but implementing them can be a bit tricky, so this would be a huge help!
Not yet, this first AI tool is a focused Writing Assistant, we’ll be rolling out more useful tools in the future 
Hi @Dan, sorry for my late response. I have read “the road ahead”. Also I saw the opening of the store has already been announced! That’s great!
The reason I think it is urgent is because of what I read here on the forum: third parties can make small and special things that will not (yet?) be made by the Realmac team. Much more choice for the users and hopefully a good living for the developers.
As for my own needs:
- Something like Doobox’s “Obscure” stack. Obscure Stack
- Something like the Stacks4Stacks “RuleStack” stack where you can put an icon (SVG?) in the middle of the rule. RuleStack Stacks Addon by Stacks4Stacks
- A little more user friendly lightbox (for the elderly among us ;-), see Lightbox image component: cursor as a link? And close in the entire area?
It would be awesome if this can be part of the elements app.