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😺 Canva Magic Studio

😺 Canva Magic Studio

PLUS: Two important coding myths!

Noah Edelman & Pete Huang
October 05, 2023

Welcome, humans.

Each new tech wave brings its own set of scammers. Finance had Bernie Madoff. Crypto had SBF. And Healthtech had Elizabeth Holmes (or “Lizzy” as the NYT calls her).

AI's bound to have its scoundrels, too. Our fix? Make every AI startup founder, post-Series C, take a lie detector test on Instagram Live.

Here’s what you need to know about AI today:

Canva launched an AI suite to make design easier.
AI won't magically turn you into a coding wizard.
AI does better when it “thinks before it speaks”.
Google’s Pixel 8 comes with an AI-fueled editor.

Canva’s New AI Tools Turn Non-Designers Into Designers.

For those of us who are artistically challenged (guilty), there are two heavyweights battling it out to make design easier through AI.

First up is Adobe, which launched its all-in-one AI design suite “Firefly” last month.
The second is Canva, which released a fresh set of AI tools called "Magic Studio" yesterday.

The two are like fraternal twins — think Zoom & Google Meet.

Both offer editing perks like augmenting, switching, and expanding images based on text prompts. Both are enterprise-safe (aka no legal headaches). And both have nightmares thinking about DALL-E 3 (jk, kinda).

We personally tried Canva's fresh tools and here's what caught our eye:

It’s a great headstart for non-designers. Just describe a social post or slide deck, and voilà — get a draft in seconds.
You can generate short vids using Runway (just type in a prompt or upload existing images).
Instant content reformatting: you can turn a design into a blog post, website, or Instagram story (plus, switch languages). Fantástico!

If your team designs a lot and isn’t already a Firefly junkie, Canva Magic Studio gets our blessing.

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Tonic Solar is your answer to keeping data safe as you build with AI:

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AI Doesn’t Replace Coders, It Makes Great Ones Even Better…

When humans saw ChatGPT could code, two narratives went mainstream:

AI will replace coders.
Non-coders will become great coders.

Both are flat-out WRONG (and we have proof).

A squad of engineers tried to recreate Flappy Bird by prompting ChatGPT (yeah, remember that game?). Spoiler alert: there's no "magic prompt” that could just recreate the entire game.

Instead, devs had to engage in a back-and-forth dialogue with ChatGPT to refine and debug the code. Not so great news for English majors on a job hunt. One savvy commenter said it best:

“This is because the use of (a programming) language has never been the real challenge of writing code. The real challenge is knowing what you want, and to be able to break it down in sufficient detail for the result to be useful.”

So AI…

doesn’t turn non-coders into Google engineers.
can elevate good coders → exceptional coders (case in point).

… but you still need the basics, much like knowing the rules of chess before taking a player’s Queen.

Around the Horn.

More research found that telling AI to “think before you speak” yields better answers.
Google’s Pixel 8 & 8 Pro will sport AI-powered editing features (think: gap-filling in photos) and a more advanced AI assistant.
Meta’s new AI tools will help advertisers create backgrounds, expand images, and generate multiple versions of ad copy.
What LinkedIn’s OpenAI-powered assistant got right (and wrong).