Canva “incredibly excited” by AI image generation as Australian tech unicorn reveals new ‘magic’ tools

Canva has unveiled a suite of new AI-powered tools for its growing platform, promising users access to custom-made designs generated from a single source image, and other features it claims will help users unlock their graphic creativity.

As part of its Canva Create event, the Australian unicorn revealed updates to its enterprise-focused Visual Worksuite system, which co-founder Melanie Perkins said will help users to turn their concepts into reality.

“As technology continues to advance, we are reimagining the design process by making it even easier to take what is in your head, get it onto a page, and out into the world, faster than ever before,” Perkins said in a statement.

Key updates include the new ‘Magic Design’ feature, which promises to let users upload an image, select a predetermined graphic design style, and access customised templates based on their input.

Source: Canva

Similarly, the ‘Magic Edit’ function will allow users to describe an element they want added to an image, with Canva inserting the new addition based on their prompt.

Beyond the image-editing tools, Canva says its new suite of AI-powered updates will auto-generate full presentations based on user prompts, and sync slides to the beat of background music.

Canva’s existing text-to-image functionality — first announced in September — has been revamped, the company says, resulting in faster image processing times and resolutions up to 16 times greater than in prior iterations.

AI arms race accelerates

By announcing the new AI-powered tools, Canva has only intensified the image generation arms race between itself, industry incumbent Adobe, and the growing collection of AI-image upstarts like Stable Diffusion and OpenAI’s DALL-E.

Adobe this week launched Firefly, its own generative product, which promises to turn text-based prompts into images, videos, brushes, and gradients across much of the Adobe software suite.

Canva’s text-to-image beta was built on Stable Diffusion, which, along with DALL-E, is becoming a go-to image creation tool for online creatives in its own right.

The announcement of Canva’s new AI-powered functions, and the broader rise of artificial image generation, come as lawmakers begin to seriously consider how the technology could affect Australian workers.

Minister for Science and Industry Ed Husic last week said the federal government is contemplating ways to effectively bridge the gap between emerging AI systems and small businesses, in an attempt to boost their productivity and increase global competitiveness.

Speaking to the National Press Club on Wednesday, Husic also revealed he is also waiting on the findings of a National Science and Technology Council report mapping out the technology’s potential economic and ethical drawbacks.

“You shouldn’t just look at technology as plug it into the wall, switch it on and everything will be right,” Husic said.

Critics of the technology fear AI systems can regurgitate information built on the words, imagery, or designs created by others, without adequately referencing the original creators or compensating them for their work.

(This fear was addressed by Adobe, which used its product demonstration to state Firefly will only ‘train’ itself on assets contained in the Adobe Stock image archives.)

Even deeper concerns exist beyond the world of design, given the potential for advanced AI systems to mishandle personal information, potentially exposing users to real-world harms.

But Canva’s new forays into AI are simply “increasing the tooling available to designers,” said Andrew Green, Canva’s head of design.

Speaking to SmartCompany ahead of the Canva Create event, Green said he was “incredibly excited, frankly,” by the increasing integration of AI into Canva’s product suite.

Instead of seeing AI graphics as a competitor to work compiled by human hands and existing technology, Green said the update is “another evolution of the tooling that designers can use to increase the quality of their craft, and to apply their strategic knowledge on how to solve a problem with design.”

“And we embrace it, rather than running away from it or fearing any of those developments, which is why we’re really excited about it,” he added.