ChatGPT just launched a new feature in beta they’re calling Canvas, and this is a killer feature that I’m immediately in love with. It really does a great job of connecting the dots on a lot of the great use cases for ChatGPT, and kind of removes the friction of having to figure it out yourself, and instead just turns it into an easy-to-use tool for brainstorming, iterating, and improving content that you’re writing.

It’s a lot like a feature that Anthropic already had they call Artifacts, but so far I’m really liking the ChatGPT implementation because it feels just a little bit cleaner, plus Anthropic has really low usage limits, so on the higher usage limits in ChatGPT+, I think this is a much more useful feature here. It is currently just a plus feature, meaning you have to be paying for their subscription. They also have it labeled as beta, so take that into consideration, but I do strongly recommend you play with it.

Essentially what Canvas does is gives you sort of a word processor-like interface, so rather than saying, hey ChatGPT, you know, make me a story about a shark, and it just being in the chat, and you keep having to, you know, go back up and down in the chat, it takes your story there and puts it over on the side in its own frame that you can edit directly, so whether you’re starting with something that it created or you’re writing your own thing from scratch, you’ve got all of the text and you can write directly into it, so if you want to change the title, you just change the title like you would in a word processor. It doesn’t regenerate the whole thing for you, but then you’ve also got like line-by-line AI integration, so you can select a line and do something with it, like, hey ChatGPT, I don’t think this line makes sense, what do you suggest? Or insert another paragraph that explains this concept. It’s also got a few controls to do stuff to the entire document, lengthening, shortening, but I think the coolest one is simply the ability to add recommendations. You click this and ChatGPT just goes through your entire document and adds little comment bubbles over to the side, and each one of those comment bubbles is an action you can interact with, so you can, rather than, again, just talking about the whole document, it’s now broken down into pieces.

I played with it this morning a little bit with my resume. It’s gonna be huge in improving that. I also played with it on a blog article, and it’s gonna be very helpful in making changes there. I also used it on this, so this thing you’re reading right now, I started by just dictating using the voice interface. I took that into the canvas and then asked it for suggestions on how to make it better, and then just went through and kind of tweaked the suggestions.

Again, to make it clear here, I’m not talking about using ChatGPT to write something for you. This is really using it in that first pillar of AI as an assistant in the smoothest possible way. Really great feature. Definitely recommend playing with it.