Canva apologizes after its AI tool replaces ‘Palestine’ in designs

Jess Weatherbedis a news writer focused on creative industries, computing, and internet culture. Jess started her career at TechRadar, covering news and hardware reviews.One of Canva’s new AI features has been caught replacing the word “Palestine” in designs. The Magic Layers feature — which is designed to break flat images out into separate editable components — isn’t supposed to make visible alterations to user designs, but it was found by X user @ros_ie9 to automatically switch the phrase “cats for Palestine” to “cats for Ukraine.”The issue was seemingly limited specifically to the word “Palestine,” as @ros_ie9 noted that related words like “Gaza” were unaffected by the 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 it,” Canva spokesperson Louisa Green told The Verge. “We take reports like this very seriously, and we’re putting additional checks in place to help prevent this in future. We’re sorry for any distress this may have caused.”Replies to the now-viral X post suggest that other users were able to replicate the bug before Canva fixed it, though my own tests didn’t show any words — Palestine or otherwise — being altered by the feature.Still, this is one heck of a blunder, especially for a platform that’s increasingly trying to compete against Adobe’s suite of AI-powered design tools. Magic Layers is a major component of Canva’s recent AI overhaul, which it claims “marks the beginning of the next era of creation.”Follow topics and authors from this story to see more like this in your personalized homepage feed and to receive email updates.Jess Weatherbed