WordPress Gets AI Assistant That Can Edit Text, Generate Images and Tweak Your Site (techcrunch.com)
(Wednesday February 18, 2026 @11:40AM (msmash)
from the for-what-it's-worth dept.)
- Reference: 0180822458
- News link: https://slashdot.org/story/26/02/18/1543255/wordpress-gets-ai-assistant-that-can-edit-text-generate-images-and-tweak-your-site
- Source link: https://techcrunch.com/2026/02/17/wordpress-com-adds-an-ai-assistant-that-can-edit-adjust-styles-create-images-and-more/
WordPress has started rolling out an AI assistant built into its site editor and media library that can edit and translate text, generate and edit images through Google's Nano Banana model, and [1]make structural changes to sites like creating new pages or swapping fonts.
Users can also invoke the assistant by tagging "@ai" in block notes, a commenting feature added to the site editor in December's WordPress 6.9 update. The tool is opt-in -- users need to toggle on "AI tools" in their site settings -- though sites originally created using WordPress's AI website builder, launched last year, will have it enabled by default.
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2026/02/17/wordpress-com-adds-an-ai-assistant-that-can-edit-adjust-styles-create-images-and-more/
Users can also invoke the assistant by tagging "@ai" in block notes, a commenting feature added to the site editor in December's WordPress 6.9 update. The tool is opt-in -- users need to toggle on "AI tools" in their site settings -- though sites originally created using WordPress's AI website builder, launched last year, will have it enabled by default.
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2026/02/17/wordpress-com-adds-an-ai-assistant-that-can-edit-adjust-styles-create-images-and-more/
Hosting WordPress is *asking* for hackers (Score:2)
by Tony Isaac ( 1301187 )
I run a small web site with about 500 active users, so not exactly prominent on the world stage. Yet I get an average of 100 attempts per day to access URLs like /wp-admin, even though my site is not WordPress. Clearly, they bots are out there trying to find open doors.
Re: (Score:2)
by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 )
Based on my logs from various web servers we run... those URLs get regularly pinged regardless of the presence of any CMS at all.
What fresh new Hell is this? (Score:3)
I can have all the downsides of Wordpress, with the added downsides of AI assisted content creation AND AI assisted page layout? This is amazing! What an absolute game changer! Can it negatively impact site security and performance in fun and interesting ways while it's at it? That would be super helpful.
Re: (Score:3)
Drupal has done the same thing. I installed their new turnkey distribution ("Drupal CMS 2.0") and it came with an AI bullshit module. Naturally this was the first thing I tore out. (Followed by the new package manager, which also means losing automatic updates, but neither thing works well anyway so the only reasonable way to manage Drupal is from the CLI using composer and drush.)
On the plus side, it's easy to not use these misfeatures.
If I wanted AI to do something for me for Drupal, it would be to write
Re: (Score:3)
Problem is that it's great for people that publish to wordpress that already do their best to produce low quality slop to flood the internet, even before AI slop was available.
Now they can push more slop more quickly than ever before, further flooding the internet with low quality crap that drowns out actual quality material.
Re: (Score:2)
> Problem is that it's great for people that publish to wordpress that already do their best to produce low quality slop to flood the internet, even before AI slop was available.
> Now they can push more slop more quickly than ever before, further flooding the internet with low quality crap that drowns out actual quality material.
Yes, and imagine how nice it'll be to have every individual sentence written by the user turned into a novel-length SEO driven AI hallucination nightmare.
I'm beginning to wonder how many years of usefulness to humans the Internet has left.
Re: (Score:2)
Now here's a recipe for a grilled cheese sandwich. But in order for you to understand exactly how this recipe works, let me relate to you my experience growing up and how grilled cheese played a factor...