Press Release: A New AI Initiative in Drupal

A New AI Initiative in Drupal

Today we are delighted to announce the creation of a new AI Initiative module. This is the result of a collaboration between many current Drupal AI module maintainers and aims to be a single, complete set of foundational tools for all AI modules, features and applications.

2023 was a banner year for artificial intelligence. Terms like ChatGPT, LLM, Generative AI, Bard, Co-Pilot, BingChat and more entered the public lexicon and the potential of generative AI captured everyone's attention at a global level. 

In Drupal, we saw many integrations covering the various spectrum of AI applications in a CMS and how that could benefit users. 

If you want to get up to speed on what we were up to last year with AI and Drupal, you can check out the following articles: 

• The Rise of OpenAI and ChatGPT 

• AI, ChatGPT, Recipes, and More: A Drupalcon 2023 Recap 

• Debug Errors in Drupal using ChatGPT and Ignition 

• How Drupal Site Builders Can Wield the Power of ChatGPT 

• Controlling Drupal via ChatGPT: Is Drupal coming for your Job?

• Workflows of AI -  Collection of tutorials for AI Interpolator

We released a module integrating ChatGPT and OpenAI for Drupal 10 at the beginning of 2023. It integrates the API from OpenAI to leverage ChatGPT and other models to augment and add assistive AI transforming the way you manage your content and maintenance tasks in Drupal. At the time of this writing it has close to 1000 installs and is by far one of the most installed AI integration modules.

At the same time, modules like AI Interpolator appeared and demonstrated different applications and use cases of AI in a content management system like Drupal and what that can look like. Whereas libraries such as LangChain demonstrated the power of AI in complex applications, they still required large amounts of code. AI Interpolator showed that, even without code, such applications could be created in just a couple of hours. 

Together with other community efforts, this made Drupal one of the first open-source content management systems to offer free AI integration for users with varying needs, even among its closed source or proprietary contemporaries. 

Today, we look to introduce a broader effort for generative AI in Drupal with leading community members. 

The Maintainers

FreelyGive - Marcus Johansson (Marcus_Johansson), Jamie Abrahams (yautja_cetanu)
Velir - Kevin Quillen (kevinquillen)
Michal Gow (seogow)

Soapbox - (scott_euser)

The Initiative

Our aim is to consolidate the best features of the contributed modules into a solid AI foundation for Drupal that provides a great out of the box experience for site builders and makes it easy to work with popular providers like OpenAI, HuggingFace, Claude, Mistral or Ollama to name a few. We also want to provide a rich plugin system for developers to extend and integrate their own services or features easily. 

We hope to work with the community to identify which AI-powered features are the most significant and valuable for inclusion into Starshot’s 2024 release, and demonstrate that Drupal is still at the cutting edge of innovation.

Dries Buytaert said that Drupal has led the way in many “golden eras of the web,” including low-code/no-code capabilities and democratizing web publishing. Today, we hope to continue this tradition. Recipes and modules built on top of the AI module will make it easier than ever for beginners to get started with Drupal itself. Meanwhile other non-technical users will be able to build complex AI applications combined with the flexibility and openness of Drupal with little to no code. 

Please join the #ai channel in the Drupal Slack if you’d like to keep up to date or participate in this initiative.

You can visit the project page on Drupal.org here: https://www.drupal.org/project/ai