Canva addresses generative AI security with new Canva Shield product

Canva just dropped a slew of big announcements, with the headline act being its new AI-powered Magic Studio. But one that flew slightly further under the radar was Canva Shield.

Ever since the popularity of generative AI exploded with the release of ChatGPT, there has been increasing concern about security, trust and ethics. This is a good thing, particularly as laws and regulations scramble to catch up with the speed of this technology.

As more software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies and tech giants roll out their own AI products, people are looking at how they’re doing it. And this particularly goes for those in the creative space, like Canva.

Because it’s not just about privacy and security at that point, questions around intellectual property, brand safety, artistic protection and payment come into play.

And Canva Shield is said to address a lot of that. According to Canva, it is an “enterprise-grade security, privacy and indemnification platform that aims to provide teams and organisations with peace of mind when creating content”.

“One of the things we have heard from enterprise customers is that they’re really excited about the AI world, but they also want to be cautious about it,” Cameron Adams, co-founder and chief product officer at Canva, said on a call.

“Canva Shield is directly responding to them and including a bunch of features for our enterprise customers that gives them that trust and safety that they are requiring.”

The different elements of Canva Shield

Adams revealed that there are four unique parts to Canva Shield. The first is indemnification for enterprise customers using Magic Studio. This allows them to safely use generative AI in the materials they create at no extra cost.

The second is a $200 million AI royalty program for Canva users over the next two years.

“With the new creator fund, they get access to a royalty pool that is aligned with AI creations. So as people use these AI tools throughout Canva, our creators who sign up to this program will also get rewarded for it,” Adams said.

Finally, Canva Shield also offers trust and safety tools including automated content moderation, prompt filtering and reporting functionalities. Canva has also said it includes an industry-first de-biasing model that ensures that Magic Studio produces safe and inclusive content.

“We have an amazing security, trust and safety team who are analysing all of our AI tools across Canva,” Adams said.

“[They] make sure that we deal appropriately with the inputs that people are putting  in Canva to make sure that’s safe — as well as the outputs that are coming out of all these tools.”

“All of it has been focused on by that trust and safety team to make sure that it’s trusted and reliable content that can go out to all of our audiences, from teachers and students to the large businesses and enterprises.”