On Thursday, OpenAI introduced a recent way to interact with ChatGPT: an interface it calls the “canvas.” The product opens a separate window, next to the regular chat window, with a workspace for writing and coding projects. Users can generate text or code directly on the canvas and then highlight sections of their work to edit the model. Canvas will be available in beta to ChatGPT Plus and Teams users on Thursday, and to Enterprise and Edu users next week.
Several consumer AI providers are focusing on editable artboards, which is a practical way to leverage generative AI. The recent ChatGPT interface offers similar features to Anthropica artifactslaunched in June, and its viral coding companion, Cursor. OpenAI is racing to match competitor offerings and launch entirely recent capabilities in ChatGPT to grow its paid user base.
Today, AI chatbots cannot complete gigantic projects all at once, but they can often provide a good starting point. Editable workspaces like canvas allow users to fix erroneous parts of an AI chatbot’s output without having to check prompts and generate an entirely recent piece of code.
“It’s just a more natural interface to work with ChatGPT,” OpenAI product manager Daniel Levine said in a TechCrunch demo.
In our demo, Levine had to select “GPT-4o with canvas” from the ChatGPT model selection drop-down box. However, OpenAI says canvas windows will simply pop up when ChatGPT detects that a separate workspace might be helpful, for example for longer results or elaborate coding tasks. You can also just type “use canvas” to automatically open the project window.
Levine showed TechCrunch how ChatGPT’s recent features can lend a hand you write emails. Users can ask ChatGPT to generate an email message, which will then be displayed in the work window. Users can then toggle the slider to adjust the length of the letter to make it shorter or longer. You can also highlight specific sentences and ask ChatGPT to make changes, such as “making it sound friendlier” or adding an emoji. Users can also ask ChatGPT to rewrite the entire email unchanged in another language.
The features of the coding canvas are slightly different. Levine asked ChatGPT to create a Python API web server that appeared in the canvas window. By pressing the “add comments” button, ChatGPT will add built-in documentation explaining the code in plain English. Moreover, if you highlight a section of code created by ChatGPT, you can ask the chatbot to explain it to you or ask questions about it. ChatGPT is also getting a recent “review code” button that will suggest specific code changes in the window, whether user generated or written, for the user to approve, self-edit or reject. If they press “Commit”, ChatGPT will take care of fixing the errors itself.
OpenAI says it plans to make this feature available to free users as well once canvas comes out of beta.