Drupal AI Module: A Beginner's Guide to General Settings

If you've installed the Drupal AI module and landed on the settings page wondering what half of it means, this one's for you. No jargon, just plain explanations of what each setting actually does and why you'd bother changing it.

First, what does the AI module actually do?

Here's the part that trips people up: installing the AI module by itself doesn't make anything happen on your site. It's not a feature — it's plumbing.

Think of it like installing electrical wiring in a house. The wiring itself doesn't turn on any lights. You still need to plug in a lamp (a submodule or contrib module) for anything to actually work. The AI module is the wiring that lets different AI tools talk to your Drupal site in a consistent way.

You need a "provider" module too

The AI module doesn't come with any AI built in. It doesn't talk to OpenAI, or Anthropic, or any other AI service on its own — it just provides the framework that lets those connections happen.

To actually use AI, you need to separately install a provider module — this is the piece that connects to a specific AI company, like OpenAI or Hugging Face. There's a list of available providers in the module's documentation sidebar, and you can install more than one if you want options.

Setting a default AI model

Once you've installed a provider, head to /admin/config/ai/settings to set up default models.

Here's the plain-language version: AI providers usually offer several different "models" — think of them like different employees with different skills. Some are good at writing, some at checking content, some at generating images. The settings page lets you pick which model should be used by default for each type of task (called an "operation type"), like chat, content moderation, or text-to-image.

Why bother? Because once you set this up, other modules that plug into the AI module don't need to ask "which model should I use?" every single time — they just use your default. Most modules will still let you override this default for specific cases if you want something different for a particular task.

Adjusting the timeout

AI requests don't always come back instantly. Some tasks — translating a long page, or using a more "thoughtful" model that reasons through a problem — can take a while.

By default, Drupal will wait 60 seconds for an AI response before giving up. If you're using a model that regularly needs longer than that, you can increase this timeout under the Advanced Settings section of the same settings page (/admin/config/ai/settings). This just stops your site from cutting off a slow-but-working request too early.

Setting up moderation (don't skip this one)

This is the setting most people overlook, and it matters more than it sounds.

If your site lets users or editors send content to an AI — for example, typing prompts into a chatbot — there's a real risk that someone eventually sends something inappropriate. Many AI companies will actually suspend your account if too many requests violate their content policies, even if it wasn't your site's fault directly.

Moderation acts as a checkpoint. Before your content reaches the main AI model, a separate moderation model checks whether it's safe to send. If it's flagged as unsafe, the request gets stopped before it ever reaches the AI — protecting both your users and your standing with the AI provider.

A few things worth knowing:

• Some providers handle this automatically. OpenAI and Mistral, for example, already moderate content on their end, so you may not need to set up anything extra if you're only using them.
• For providers that don't moderate automatically, the AI module gives you a way to add moderation yourself, under /admin/config/ai/ai-external-moderation.
• How it works: you choose a provider and one or more models to act as the moderator, and optionally limit it to specific situations using tags. Moderation always runs first — if it says "unsafe," the actual AI operation never happens.

The bottom line

The AI module is the foundation, not the finished feature. Once it's set up properly — provider connected, default models chosen, timeout adjusted if needed, and moderation in place if you're exposing AI to users — everything built on top of it just works more smoothly, without each module needing its own separate configuration. Here is a quick visual walk through :

Setting up AI on your Drupal site and not sure where to start? Get in touch — happy to walk through it with you.