EP 114: Canva and AI - A Winning Combination?

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Is Canva's AI a game changer? Will it be competing with Adobe Photoshop and Midjourney and Dolly? Or is it just going to be a marketing piece for the giant design maker? We're going to go over that and a little bit more today on Everyday AI. Welcome. This is your daily live stream, podcast and free daily newsletter helping everyday people like you and me make the most out of what's going on in the world of generative AI. Alright, so if you, you are joining us live. Thank you. We actually had some, there's some issues with the, the LinkedIn live stream but so thanks, thanks for sticking around and finding today's stream and if you are joining us on the podcast, thank you as well. Thank you for joining every single day. Make sure to check the show notes inside the podcast episode. We always have complimentary content. Uh, you know, we, we break down each day's episode, uh, on our website as well as the newsletter. So make sure you go sign up for that. But before we get into and we start answering some of those, some of these questions about Canva's new AI features, let's first get into the AI news. All right, so first, will AI be your new money manager? A recent report from Bloomberg suggests maybe that's the future. So this Bloomberg article detailed the efforts of the Volion Group, which uses AI to pick stocks and manage its $5 billion in assets in the results. Well, so far Voleon is using AI to pick stocks and beating the market. So make sure to keep an eye out on that. Next, was Bing's AI chat overhyped? Well, its own CEO said maybe so. So Microsoft CEO SATA Nadella said said that he may have overhyped the impact of Microsoft's new AI being searched when it was first announced a couple of months ago. You know what, I think we're not hyping enough. Microsoft's copilot coming out in November. I've talked about that once or twice, but I think, I think that's going to be truly transformative. Speaking of transformative, Google Bard or Google's Bard AI Chatbot is hoping that their new feature is transformative at least. So they did. We mentioned this in the newsletter, but it came out right after our, our live stream yesterday. But so they just announced memory. So essentially Google Bard's new memory features is pretty similar to custom instructions From Chat GPT OpenAI platform where instead of having to re. Remind the chat all the time, maybe who you are or what you wanted to talk about. The new Google Bard. Google Bard's new memory feature just allows you to input it once and then Google Bard will remember. All right, so let's, let's get back to it. Let's talk about Canva's AI and is it any good? And you know, I'm very curious who out there is using Canvas AI features? Because if I'm being honest, we use Canva almost every day and it's, it's become a really crucial part for a lot of small businesses. Workflow, I'd say. And even just you know, brief, very brief background before we get into it. I've been using different designs programs, you know, Adobe photoshop since probably 2002 or no, 2003 maybe. So I've been using Photoshop for 20 years. I used to use these other, you know, archaic programs when I was designing newspapers back in the day in my hometown of Freeport, Illinois. I was using Quark Express. So I've, you know, I've used all the Adobe suites. I've used all of, you know, dozens, probably more than a dozen other design programs, if I'm being honest. Canva I think has really taken over the design scene, you know. So I do think what we're going to see now, especially when it comes to AI, we're going to see Canva and Photoshop, you know, specifically Adobe kind of compete, right, and try to roll out better, better AI powered features and kind of one up each other so you know, to compete, catch everyone up. If you haven't seen, you know, Adobe and specifically Photoshop have really invested heavily in AI features. So you know, things called generative fill and there's a whole host of other things that Photoshop has announced and you know, recently, I think it was last week Photoshop announced that they were bringing its basic version of Photoshop online, which they really hadn't done before. So that seemingly was a shot at least at maybe Canva and saying, all right, you know, it's, they've been taking market share. We're going to bring, you know, kind of everything online and bring Photoshop and all of the new AI features to, to the desktop. So what's also important to know before we jump in, very brief history of, of Canva, if you haven't used it before, it is, I wouldn't even say it's, it's really a Photoshop competitor per se. I'd say it's more of if you've used Adobe InDesign. But it is essentially the easiest, I think, the easiest way for anyone to design anything. Canva is. Right. And we're going to jump in. I'm going to share my screen here. But to describe on the podcast, if you haven't used Canva, you can very easily create a presentation, a flyer. They have thousands of templates that are very well designed. I think that was probably one of the things that helped Canva kind of catapult itself to kind of dominance and to instantly compete with Adobe was just the number of extremely high quality templates, how easy they are to use. And now we do have some AI features as well, which we're going to show you the basics. So let's, let's go ahead and do one more quick reminder because this is timely. All right. Because tomorrow actually Canva has their magic event, I believe is what they're calling it, so on October 4th, and they're going to be announcing presumably a lot of new AI features. Right. So I wanted to give everyone a precursor first, you know, an episode that you can kind of go back and watch. You know, as you know, Canva is releasing presumably a lot of new AI features because everything inside of Canva, all of their AI offerings are called magic. Right. So with the magic event tomorrow, presumably we're going to be seeing a lot of new AI features. All right, so let me know, let me know in the comments. Are you, are you all using Canva? So May Brit said it would be great if Canva would integrate with webflow. Yes, absolutely. Love, love webflow, another great tool. I think Figma might connect with webflow, FYI. All right, let's, let's jump in. I'm going to go ahead and share my screen and we're going to go over some of the basics of AI of different AI features in Canva, all right. And we're going to talk a little bit about how to use them. All right, so here we go. We have, I'm actually sharing, I'm going to make, I'm going to make myself kind of disappear here. There we go. Perfect. All right, so I'm going to do my best to describe what's on screen. Nothing crazy, but you'll see we actually use Canva. So for our cover art, things like that, we use Canva all the time for the everyday AI show. So I'm going to go up here and I'm going to click, create a design and then I'm going to go ahead, let's Just click presentation. All right, so I'm going to start with something that I think a lot of people don't know, and it's something that is a little hidden, actually. So Canva used to have a dedicated button for something called Magic Design. Okay. Again, I'm gonna, I'm gonna zoom in here and hopefully everyone can see it, but I'm gonna do my best to describe this for, you know, anyone listening on the podcast. So eventually, or sorry. Essentially, Canva used to have an area called Magic Design where you could, you know, create anything really, from scratch, and they got rid of the button. So it's. It's kind of curious. I've. I've seen a lot of people say, oh, no, they just got rid of it. Nope, it's not. It's actually just in the corner in the search bar, which is probably not the best user interface user experience to let people know that this amazing feature is here. Right. Because this is, I think, one of the better features of Canva's AI of their magic, is you can create an entire presentation just by typing something in right here in the upper left hand corner, which looks like a normal search bar. Right. And all it says is, it says, use five plus words to describe. So many people don't see that. So I'm just typing in something. I'm saying the history of artificial intelligence. All right? And I'm hitting enter. All right, so what you're going to see at the top, you're going to see essentially things kind of rendering, and then you see something pop up that says Magic Design. Right. So it's, it's, it's curious that they kind of took away that visual reminder that this feature even exists. So, yeah, like Jackie, as an example, Jackie says, have not found a great, you know, PowerPoint or Slides Gen AI tool. I think this could be it. It's just actually Canva, for whatever reason, has deprioritized. Right. So you'll see right here, it says Magic Design in the upper left hand corner. Now these icons are filled in. I should actually. It would probably help if I did. Did the correct tab. Right. So I'm gonna, I'm gonna go ahead. I'm gonna go ahead. Sorry, y'. All. I'm gonna go ahead and show you this again. So what you're going to do is go to the upper left hand corner and you are going to click in that box, put in a short description. So I put the history of artificial intelligence, and now you have these Magic design elements popping up. Right. So all I'm going to do is, I'm going to go ahead, I can scroll through these with my mouse and you'll see there's about six or seven different options, right? And I'm going to go ahead and choose one. So I'm going to choose, I'm going to choose this one. And you'll see now when I click on that one, I get all of these different pages that pop up. So that's the thing. I'm not sure why Canva has kind of hidden or deprioritized to an extent this, this feature, but it is right there, right? And then all I'm going to do is I'm going to click apply all seven pages. All right? And now as you guys can. Can hopefully see, it's all right there. So now, yes, I do have an entire presentation, you know, on artificial intelligence, on the history of artificial intelligence. So it not only. And I just, I, I want to make sure that I'm explaining this correctly for those listening on the podcast. So it not only created me a design that I can edit, right? I can go ahead and swap out any of these photos, I can edit these headings, but it also created the text. Right? So again, canva, I'm not sure why they really kind of almost hid this feature. It's hard to find. It used to be a large button in the upper left hand corner of the interface and now it's gone. But you'll see here now I have an entire presentation showing me the history of artificial intelligence, which again, I can go and edit. You know, it's not, you know, you're probably going to want to go through and make some changes. You know, some of the text is a little small for the amount, for the amount that's there. But what you can also do is go to any page and you can still use the Canva Assistant. Okay, so that's another AI feature that's worth talking about. I'm going to go ahead and try to. There we go. I'm going to move myself over. So in the lower right hand corner you can see the Canva Assistant. So what you can do right here is they have what's called Magic Write. So essentially if I want to expand this text, I can. So I'm going to. Let's see if I can select the whole. I'm actually just going to select one and then I have the magic. So the Canva assistant can bring up the magic, right? Or I can go to. When I just click on something, the Magic Write tool will come so I'm going to click Magic Write and I'm just going to say continue writing. Right, so from there it's going to expand that piece of text. Right. And now we have much larger group, a much larger piece of text right here. So you'll see right there. This is pretty impressive, right? Yes. There are other tools out there that if you just want to use AI to create an entire presentation, tome is great. T O M e beautiful. AI does a great job. We've covered some of these other tools before, but right there, Canva, I mean, I just showed you, it's kind of a hidden feature, but it does actually a great job. All right, so I think if you learn nothing else, upper left hand corner. When you go to start a new design, all you're going to do. Right there, I have it. All you're going to do is type it. Okay. And then it's going to come up. All right, so couple questions, Cecilia asking how much is Canva? Canva has a great free plan, but the majority of their offerings are not free. Especially the, the AI offerings. Right, Those are not free. Those. I think it's 10, I think, I believe it's $10 a month. Right, so good, good question there and thank you for that question. All right, so let's get back into it and talk a little bit about some other AI features inside Canva. And again, we are having, it looks like some, some technical difficulties, but hopefully you still, still able to follow, follow along here. So let's look at some other features. So I'm going to go. And we're going to click, we're going to click out here. Let's go ahead and go to file. We're going to create a new design and let's go back into presentation. All right, so we're going to create a blank, a blank presentation. Now, Are you still running in circles trying to figure out how to actually grow your business with AI? Maybe your company has been tinkering with large language models for a year or more, but can't really get traction to find ROI on just gen AI. Hey, this is Jordan Wilson, host of this very podcast. Companies like Adobe, Microsoft and Nvidia have partnered with us because they trust our expertise in educating the masses around generative AI to get ahead. And some of the most innovative companies in the country hire us to help with their AI strategy and to train hundreds of their employees on how to use Gen AI. So whether you're looking for ChatGPT training for thousands or just need help building your front end AI Strategy, you can partner with us too. Just like some of the biggest companies in the world do. Go to your everyday AI.com partner to get in contact with our team, or you can just click on the partner section of our website. We'll help you stop running in those AI circles and help get your team ahead and build a straight path to ROI on Gen. All right, so again, hopefully, hopefully we're still following. If someone, if someone could, could let me know in the comments, that'd be great. There's, there's a lot of use today with the LinkedIn Live Stream, but we're gonna, we're gonna keep this going. So another thing that we can do with the CANVA AI is editing photos, which, which I think is great. But actually before we do that, let's even just go and find their AI photo generator, because I think that's something that a lot of people. Again, it's a little hidden, so you have to go to Elements. You're going to scroll down and then go to AI Image Generator. Right. So I'm going to go ahead. I have a little prompt here. So all you're going to do is click Generate. You're going to put in your description of the image that you want. So this is similar, this is similar to Mid Journey or, you know, Dolly a little bit, but it's, it's not as good. Full disclosure. So let's go ahead. I'm going to click on Create your image. Okay. As you can probably see, so what I did here, I typed in a simple prompt. I said an overhead shot of a white desk with working essentials on top. Very minimalistic, showing a few objects such as a laptop, notebook, pen, and coffee mug. Okay. So now all I'm going to do, it gave me four different options to choose from that I can use in my presentation. Okay, so I'm going to go ahead and click. They're pretty busy, right? These are pretty busy, pretty busy elements right here. So I want to. I went ahead and chose one of them because I want to show you some other features and I'm going to resize this to go ahead and fit the screen a little bit here. Okay, so there we go again, if I'm being honest. I hope one of the new features that Canva is, is going to be releasing is a better image generator. Right. Because it's really for a lot of use cases. It's not that great anymore. Right. We've seen Dall E3 start to roll out Mid Journey. I think we're on 5.2. Or 5.3, it's just much better. But you see it right there. It is a very nice feature to have when you just can't find that. That photo that you need. Okay, so. So we have a photo now we put it on our presentation and I'm going to show you a couple other AI tools that I think are pretty cool inside of Canva. So all I did is I clicked the photo and I clicked Edit Photo. Okay. And now these were actually added. A lot of these were added about a week or two ago. So there's different things. And you can see all of these things are premium. So you do have to be on the paid plan. Shout out Woozy for updating the price. I believe he said you pay 12.99amonth. I think we are probably. We've been using Canva Pro for a very long time. I think we pay 999 just because, you know, maybe we were grandfathered into that price or it might be cheaper if you pay annually versus, versus yearly. All right. And yeah, thank you. Yeah, sorry. I. I know the live stream is going in and out, but hopefully we're following now. So when you have a new image in Canva, you can click on it, click Edit Image. And some of these, you know, some of these different AI tools, all with Magic in the first name, are available if you have the premium plan. Okay, so let's try a couple. I'm going to try this magic eraser, and then this, as you can imagine, is going to erase something. So I. I have a brush now, and I don't even know what this image is right here or what this. I'm not even sure. It looks like maybe a letter opener. I don't know what it is. So I'm going to go ahead and hover over it and you'll see it turns it purple. And then all that happens is it's going to take about a second and it is going to erase it. Right. And as someone that's used Photoshop for 20 years, this AI feature in Canva is actually fantastic. It works very well. So I'm going to go ahead. I'm going to go ahead and magically erase a couple of these other things because again, Canva's AI image generator is not the best. And I don't even know if I'm being honest what half of these things even are because they didn't come out very well. Okay. And again, you're. You're going to see some issues even in the magic erase. It is most of these Features are in beta. Like I tried to erase something just there, didn't know what it was. And it essentially tries to see what's behind the image to get rid of it. And you'll see in this case it's not doing the best job. But that's okay. You know, for a lot of features it does work pretty well. Let's go ahead and look at a couple of these other AI features inside Canva. Okay, so another one. And again, these work when you just click the image and go to Edit Image. So let's try Magic Edit, which is actually something I like a lot. So let's go ahead and say, all right, we like how this flower looks. So there's all these different things on our desk. It's an overhead shot. The computer looks a little crazy, doesn't look like an actual computer. So hopefully Canva's upcoming Magic event tomorrow, on October 4th, they release an upgrade to their image generating model. But with this Magic Edit, you can essentially highlight something and replace it with something else. So I'm going to. It looks like we have multiple coffees on the table, so let's just do this as an example. I'm going to go ahead and highlight and again you get this brush and you get the kind of this purple outline. So I'm going to put that in. And then on the left hand side there's different options. So you can select your brush size, blah, blah, blah. So I'm going to click Continue because this, it's correct, it is correct in its selection. So I'm going to click Continue and then it says describe what you want to add or change. Right. So again, this is a very busy image, but I'm just doing it as an example. So I'm just going to say a. I'm going to say a vibrant, vibrantly colored plant, right? And then I'm going to click the generate. So what's going to happen then is it is going to essentially erase what I highlighted and replace with whatever I put in there. So this is very similar to kind of Photoshops, some of their new AI generative fill features. And you'll see what's. What's nice is I also have four different options at the bottom here of, you know, what I typed in. So I'm gonna, I'm gonna click this. This one in the bottom left hand corner looks to be pretty colorful. I like that one. So there you go. So it didn't. Again, sometimes these features work very well, sometimes they don't. You know, if I'm Being honest, these AI features are very new inside of Canva, so it's, it's worth taking that into consideration. All right, so now we have an updated photo on our, you know, overhead desktop. You know, we've, we've deleted some elements, we've changed one. Let's try a couple other elements. And these ones in this situation I actually don't think are going to work very well. So let's, let's give it a try, and then we will pick a different image that it'll probably work a little better. So another one which is going to save a lot of time. So if you're a designer, a creative, if you work in marketing or advertising, these actual. Actually, these magic features are great when, when you can get them to work. So let's look at Magic Grab, and I can already kind of predict that the Magic Grab feature is not going to work on this image. So this image, if you're joining us on the podcast, there's a lot going on in this image. There's, you know, things that don't look right. There's way too much going on. But essentially, Magic Grab is. It's really useful for when you have a dominant, you know, foreground and background. And in this case, we don't. So I'm going to click it and it processes the image and it tries to figure out on its own what is the background, what is the foreground. And in theory, it's going to let you grab the foreground and move it. In this situation, I'm going to go ahead and move it and you'll see it kind of thought it was the shadows. Right. Which is not what we were going for. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to add a page, right. And I'm going to go ahead, I'm going to find. So I actually had this one up before. So Canva also has a lot of stock images. So this one, I think will work a lot better. It is a photo of a younger guy, probably in his 20s, just kind of like a portrait shot. Okay. So I dragged that onto my presentation. Now I'm going to click it. I'm going to click Edit photo. So now we're going to see where this Magic Grab hopefully will work a little better because we have a clearly defined foreground and background. So I'm going to click Magic Grab and it is going to process and you'll see right away it highlighted. It gave me a text or, sorry, an outline box on the foreground and background. So now what I can do is I can move this. Oh, look at that. That worked perfectly. And not only that, it fills in the background. Okay, so I saved this for last for a reason. The presentation pieces are great. This right here, doing this in another photo, in another photo editing program like Photoshop, you know, like you know, any other Adobe programs, you know, illustrator InDesign, it can actually be a time consuming process. I used to do this a lot and you know, in my background I would always have to grab, you know, grab a foreground, separate it from the background, maybe do some editing. But now you'll see I can not only reposition it and it looks fantastic, right? Because in photography there's something called like the rule of thirds, right where you, if you can imagine a kind of like a tic tac toe grid on the screen, there's always going to be four different points on your screen that, that's called the rule of thirds. And you know, if you can get your subject right on one of those, where those lines corresponding, you know, the study of photography tells us that your image will be much more compelling. So what I can do is I can even make this smaller or larger, which is fantastic. So this feature alone, if you have the right images, if you're working, let's say if you're creating some product images, you know, for a social media campaign, for an advertising campaign, you know, maybe you're, you're running cross platform ads on, you know, Meta and Instagram and display ads on Google. You can spend so much time both on the photography on the front end and on the back end editing this. Just this alone, this feature, the magic grab will save designers, marketers, advertisers, agencies, hours of time. Because this is in my opinion, yes, the image or, sorry, the presentation feature where you can create an entire presentation with AI inside of photo or sorry, inside of Canva. It is pretty nice. But if I'm, if, if I'm being honest, the feature that shines above the rest, at least right now, I would say probably second place, we have this Magic edit. But I would say first place is actually the magic grab in terms of, from my design experience. I've been designing in different capacities for 20 years since I was designing a, you know, newspapers as a 16 year old. You know, I was doing these kind of things, I was doing these in slow programs. This is a great feature. Let's go ahead, let's go ahead and try. Since we're in here, we're going to try this magic edit. So I'm going to get A huge brush size. So we have this, you know, kind of this portrait where, you know, we had a subject and this is. I think it's going to go terribly, but we're going to go ahead and try. You know, that's the thing with everyday. AI Canva's not paying us to say how great or how not great. This is going to find out live. So what's, what's doing now is we had this kind of this, this person, this model that we separated out. So now I'm going to see if we can replace it. Because here's the thing, I'm going to say a. I'm going to try to do a similar thing. So I'm going to say a mid-30s woman. I'm going to say portrait style, photography, lifelike. Because here's the thing, at least for right now, people always ask, oh, do I need mid journey? Can I just use Canva? You know, Canva has an AI image generator. No, you can't, because as you'll see here, these, these are not. These results that came up. You know, these. My prompt, I gave it, I asked for a woman in her mid-30s. It's probably giving me the results here. I do have four different ones to choose from, but it's probably more likely women in their, you know, 50s or 60s. But still, it actually did better than it had been doing previously. So I can go ahead and replace it. Unfortunately, it does have kind of this background shadow. So it's not something that it looks like it's going to work out of the box. But Canva actually, okay, it surprised me there because when I was previously playing around with the canvas AI images, when it first came out, especially with people, they were not very lifelike. And I'm not even sure to tell you the truth if this one is AI image generated or if this is actually pulling from their stock library. And that's kind of the crazy thing in today's day and age of artificial intelligence and, and you know what, what's real and what is not. All right. We were all over the place in this one. We had 50 tech problems. Everything that could go wrong in terms of this live stream did. But thank you all for sticking around. I'm gonna make sure. Let's see here. I want to throw up a couple comments. So, Jay, Jay, thanks for sticking around. He's saying, I wonder if you can fix the laptop by selecting the current laptop and replacing with another. Well, let's see real quick. Let's see real quick. Let's go ahead and Grab the, the Mac. Oops, sorry. Yep, the Magic Edit, I'm going to go ahead and select. I get a little bit bigger brush size to make this faster. Let's go ahead. I'm going to say it might work. So I just, I went back to that original image. I'm going to keep it very simple. I'm just going to say laptop. So the first laptop we used did not turn out that great. So J. Pelosi Polizi just said, hey, I wonder if you can use the Magic Edit to fix that. And you'll see it didn't do the best job. Kind of where my brush stroke kind of opened. It didn't, didn't do a great job. I do think, I do hope that part of Canva's announcement is going to be announcing some new features. All right. Yes. The Magic Grab is absolutely impressive. Nadia, thank you. Thank you for joining. Saying loves the Canva AI tools. Get good images. All right, so thank you all for joining. I know this, this episode cut in, in and out. That's all right. Y' all are the best. You stuck around. Hopefully we learned some things. Make sure you go to your Everyday AI dot com. Sign up for the free daily newsletter. If you're checking this out on the podcast, always check the show notes. We keep it all, all of this information there. Each day we not only say what's going on in the world of AI, so we always recap a couple pieces of news in the front end of the show, but we also have other pieces of news. You know, the latest software and apps that are coming out with AI, different insights from different industries, as well as always breaking down the episode in great detail. So go check that out. Thank you for joining us and we hope to see you back for another edition of Everyday AI. Thanks, y'. All.

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