Canva apologizes after its AI tool replaced the word “Palestine” in designs

One of Canva’s new products Artificial intelligence features She was caught replacing the word “Palestine” in the designs. The Magic Layers feature — designed to split flat images into separate, editable components — isn’t supposed to make visual adjustments to user designs, but it was discovered by User To automatically switch “Cats for Palestine” to “Cats for Ukraine”.

The issue appears to have been limited to the word “Palestine” specifically, as @ros_ie9 noted that related words such as “Gaza” were not affected by this feature. Canva says it has now resolved the issue and is taking steps to prevent it from happening again.

“We became aware of an issue with our Magic Layers feature and moved quickly to investigate and fix the issue,” Canva spokesperson Louisa Green said. Edge. “We take reports like this very seriously, and are conducting additional checks to help prevent this from happening in the future. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.”

The responses to X’s now-viral post suggest as much other users They were able to Recurrence of the defect Before Canva fixed it, though, my own tests didn’t show any words — Palestine or otherwise — being changed by the feature.

However, this is a huge mistake, especially for a platform that is increasingly trying to compete against Adobe’s suite of AI-powered design tools. Magic Layers are a key component of Canva’s recent AI overhaul, which it claims “marks the beginning of the next era of creativity.”