Squarespace's AI image generation could be a risky move

AI is creeping into all kinds of design software, and web design is no different. Many of the best website builders for small businesses have been adding AI tools to generate templates for some time. Now Squarespace has become the latest platform to add AI image generation and AI text generation to the mix.

Squarespace's update will see sites automatically populated with AI-generated content. But can the platform claim that "a website makes it real" if the site's all AI. Some users may have their doubts.

To be honest, when reviewing web builders for our own buying guides, I've found the existing AI features in platforms like Wix to sometimes be counterproductive, turning out results so generic that it can take longer to make them usable than it would to customise a template the traditional way. However, Squarespace clearly sees a demand for tools that can speed up web design, and its making its Blueprint AI platform a big part of its 2024 refresh.

Blueprint AI now automatically pre-populates sites with AI-generated imagery and text as they’re created. Squarespace says the imagery has been "carefully designed with a proprietary prompting approach and custom art direction" and that "each image is beautiful and inspirational." Users will also have brand personality options to direct the tone and aesthetic of generated content, from 'professional' to 'quirky'.

Squarespace is one of the most popular web builders among artists, designers and photographers thanks to its clean, minimalist templates. It's topped our own guide to the best website builders for artists for a long time. But judging by the recent reactions to AI training at Instagram, an immediate concern among creatives using the platform is likely to be, 'did Squarespace just scrape my work to create an AI web builder?'. The answer to that, at least, is no.

I'm told that despite the custom art direction, Squarespace didn't do any of the AI training itself. Instead it uses publicly available models from Google (Gemini/Imagen), OpenAI (DALL-E) and Anthropic, combining them in proprietary ways to produce the best results for customers.

So who's is Blueprint AI for? After all, using AI imagery doesn't make much sense if you're using a web builder to make a design portfolio or sell a physical product. Where it could make sense, though, is in helping users envision how the site will look when you've replaced the content with their own.

When you use a template on a web builder, it comes with whatever stock imagery the template designer chose to put in it. With Squarespace's new approach, that content will instead be generated by AI. So if you're a wedding photographer, you'll be able to see what your potential site looks like full of wedding photos rather than, say, hipsters cafes or winter coats.

Some people may also be happy to leave the AI-generated content on their site rather than seek out appropriate stock imagery, particularly if they're a small business running an online service or if they're running a blog and there's genuinely no authentic imagery to use.

There are things to consider though. Potential customers may not engage well with generic-looking AI images. And unlike Adobe Firefly, Google and OpenAI's image generators weren't trained solely on licensed images, which has raised questions about whether they're commercially safe to use. Both companies are named in lawsuits being brought by artists.