Canva GPT App Is Here

OpenAI officially launched the GPT Store a few days ago, and Canva is one of the first design companies to be featured on the homepage. As an avid user of Canva, I was curious about its capabilities and whether they are any good.

Before we get started, take note that GPT apps are only accessible to ChatGPT Plus users, which costs $20 per month.

How To Access Canva GPT

Canva GPT is currently in the featured section of the GPT Store. You can also see it under the Dall-E tab.

Click on the Canva icon, and this is what the app’s dashboard looks like:

Here’s a sample prompt:

Prompt: I need a poster for our online store’s seasonal sale

It asked me to give more details about the theme and the product I am selling.

Canva: Hello! Excited to bring your visions to life? Start your creative journey with Canva. What will we design together today? For your seasonal sale poster, could you share a bit about the theme or the kind of products your store specializes in? This will help in creating a design that truly resonates with your brand.

After providing specifics, I allowed an external site to communicate with my ChatGPT instance.

I clicked on the “Allow” button, and after a few seconds, it responded with five different design samples.

It included a disclaimer at the end that the results may not be exactly what I was looking for.

ChatGPT: While these templates might not exactly match your requested colors or theme, remember that you can easily edit and customize them in Canva to better fit your vision!

It was right, though. I mean, what’s up with the sketch of the skull??

There’s a nice feature, though. When I clicked on one of Canva GPT’s results, it redirected me to the Canva website placed on a tote bag template. How cool is that?

Let’s try another example:

Prompt: I need a sleek and minimalist book cover that says “Living in the age of AI” with black background.

Honestly, I was confused at this point because I realized it doesn’t compose templates from scratch. What I am seeing are existing templates from its design database. Some of the results are even far from being relevant to my prompt.

Note that the tagline on their GPT app says, “Effortlessly design anything: presentations, logos, social media posts, and more.” But from my initial tests, it’s not really the case. I’d rather go to Canva.com and use the search function instead.

Things to keep in mind

Here are some important things about Canva GPT you should know about:

• Canva GPT cannot generate images — do not ask the app to come up with brand new images because it can’t do it.
• Canva GPT does not create new templates — I noticed the app simply searches for the most relevant template from your query in its repository.
• Canva GPT is exactly the same as the Canva ChatGPT plugin I reviewed months ago.

Final Thoughts

Overall, I was happy to see Canva quickly make its own GPT plugin and get featured on the GPT Store. Unfortunately, I was not too impressed with its current capabilities, as it does not actually create templates from scratch. But knowing how huge Canva is, they should have enough engineers to work on significantly improving the app over time.

It would be great if future versions of Canva GPT could generate text and images and compose templates completely from scratch based on prompts. That would be a real game-changer. But this is an important first step, and I look forward to seeing how Canva leverages AI to enhance creative tools in the future.

‍