Say goodbye to hallucinating AI-powered images, thanks to Canva’s new design template

Canva unveiled a slew of new AI products and features at its fall product launch on Thursday, but this boring new tech release may actually hold the most promise. Canva has developed a new core model for AI in design. This model promises to solve one of the biggest frustrations I have with AI imagery.

Foundational models are the digital frameworks that work behind the scenes to process your AI requests. Traditional diffusion models can generate “flat” images and run several initial AI image generators. Over the past few years, these models have been upgraded to become comprehensive LLMs – essentially, they are multimodal (they can handle text, images, and other input), they have become more context-aware, and they are able to handle more complex tasks. For image generators, this means that they can process reference images, for example.

Canva’s new template works a little differently. Creates layered images while maintaining contextual awareness. All this means for you is that you will be able to select specific elements in an AI-generated image and use all of Canva’s editing tools to tweak them. You won’t have to recreate the entire image to fix one small mistake, which is a huge quality of life upgrade.

Canva has become a 65 billion dollars The company promises to make design accessible to everyone, especially those of us who are not Photoshop experts. Image generators with artificial intelligence, though not without it Disagreements and Fearsaiming to achieve the same goal. I’ve used many different AI photo programs, and the one thing that consistently disappoints me is their editing tools. Many programs, if any, are essentially abstract. Sometimes editing exacerbates errors. So, you can see why the idea of ​​editing AI images using Canva’s many one-click tools is not only attractive, but should alert other AI image companies.

“With Canva’s basic template, you can go from quick design to fully editable, layered design,” said Robert Kowalski, global head of product at Canva, in an interview. “You can use the richness of the Canva editor to literally click on any element, any component, manipulate it, and change it the way you would with a design you created by hand, from the ground up. And that’s just a really fundamental transformation.”

The editing capabilities of AI-generated content are a major concern for people using creative AI tools. Adobe also recently announced the introduction of chatbot-like AI assistants to Photoshop and Express, which can handle the same type of isolated edits. However, these Adobe assistants are nothing like Canva’s new ability to select objects or areas in an AI-generated image and edit them manually. You can chat with them as you would with ChatGPT, and they make changes independently. Adobe’s Vice President of Artificial Intelligence Alexandru Kostin told me in an interview at Adobe Max This week, the company plans to launch similar layer-based AI capabilities in the near future.

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There’s another feature here: Canva’s in-house AI image generator Great for beginnersbut she wasn’t the most impressive of the group. This new model should bring more firepower.

There are several other updates, including the ability to create forms to capture data, a new video timeline similar to Premiere Pro, and HTML-compatible email templates. You will also be able to copy the artistic style of one asset and paste it onto another object. But the only other major news is actually related to Canva’s acquisition from last year, Affinity.

Canva acquired professional design software Affinity in 2024, and now Canva users will be able to use Affinity for free, with no subscription required at all. It’s a surprising choice and makes Affinity undoubtedly the most affordable option for professional editing software, which is in line with Adobe Increasingly expensive Creative Cloud subscriptions.

The latest big batch of updates from Canva has been AI-focused as well, and tends to help its users STEM-oriented tasks such as programming.

For more, see How to write the best AI guided image and Best AI image generators.