With multiple AIs competing platforms and bots – these include Copilot, Gemini, ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity, to name a few – fresh updates and improvements appear frequently. One of the latest additions that OpenAI pushed to ChatGPT is called Canvas, and it’s a bit like AI-powered Google Docs.
OpenAI describes it as “a new way of working with ChatGPT for writing and coding” and means that you are essentially collaborating with artificial intelligence on a text document or program code. Of course, you can already do this in the main chat interface, but with Canvas it’s a bit like collaborating with an AI collaborator.
At this time, you must be a ChatGPT Enterprise, ChatGPT Pro, or ChatGPT Plus user (starting at $20 per month) to access Canvas. You’ll find it in the drop-down menu at the top of your chat screen, in the upper left corner.
First steps with canvas
Once you have selected Canvas as your AI model, you can start interacting with ChatGPT as usual. Exploit the hint box to describe the type of code you want to write or the type of text you need to generate. However, you need to say something to indicate that you want to create a fresh canvas – something like “Create Document” or “Launch Canvas” somewhere in the prompt will do this.
When the ChatGPT Canvas interface is fully launched, you’ll see a familiar chat conversation on the left and whatever you’re working on on the right. You have a few different options here. You can enter a fresh prompt for more text (or code), you can manually type something in the workspace panel, or you can select something generated by ChatGPT and request corrections.
These different options make Canvas a more collaborative mode. In the upper right corner you will find shortcuts that allow you to view previous versions of the document or copy text to another place. Meanwhile, in the lower right corner you’ll find a pop-up toolset that gives you plenty of options, depending on whether you’re writing text or programming code with ChatGPT.
If you’re a writer, you can find tools to suggest changes, adjust the length of the results ChatGPT produces, change the readability level of text, improve written text, or add emojis to your document. For example, click Reading level and utilize the slider to make the text more or less sophisticated.