Canva’s New Magic Studio Pulls Enormous Generative AI Toolkit and $200M Creator Fund Out of a Hat
Canva has waved a generative AI wand across its multimedia design services with the new Magic Studio platform, timed for the company’s tenth anniversary. The new tricks include a synthetic video creator released in partnership with generative AI video startup Runway ML and a host of tools to automate design and content creation, editing, and reformatting, such as making a social media post from an email or blog post from a flowchart. The company also announced it had found a $200 million fund behind the ear of creators whose work helped train its AI models, compensating them for their contributions.
Canva Magic Studio
Magic Studio is Canva’s vision of a comprehensive, generative AI-powered platform. The new features widen Canva’s already rapidly expanding array of generative AI functions, bringing them together as a way of boosting creativity and productivity for individuals and organizations. The Magic branding now counts tools like Magic Switch, which handles the aforementioned conversion among communication formats like emails, report summaries, and even a ‘whiteboard of ideas.’ It can also translate the content into more than 100 languages.
On the multimedia side, the new Magic Media toolkit provides both text-to-image (powered by Stable Diffusion) and Runway-fueled text-to-video or image-to-video options. Generative AI will also edit images on Canva with Magic Grab’s object identification and separation feature and Magic Expand’s ability to zoom in on parts of an image or widen it beyond the frame. Canva has also improved on its Magic Design tool, which sets up any slideshow or presentation with minimal visual input, generating even the fonts and graphics. Should a user want the AI to help out more comprehensively, they can describe a presentation they want to make in a text box, and Canva’s AI will put together an entire outline of the presentation, including content for every slide.
“A decade ago, Canva set out to empower the world to design by simplifying a complex and fragmented design ecosystem. As we go into the next decade of our journey, we’re incredibly excited to be taking a massive leap forward with the launch of Magic Studio – the first all-in-one suite of design AI tools created to supercharge the way teams create and scale visual content,” Canva CEO Melanie Perkins explained in a statement. “With a focus on making complex things simple, Magic Studio has been built for the 99% of the world without complex design training. This launch marks the start of an exciting new chapter as we double down on empowering over 150 million individuals and thousands of businesses to unlock their creativity and achieve their goals.”
Canvabracadabra
Canva began its generative AI push with Magic Write last December, a copywriting assistant capable of generating text using OpenAI’s LLMs. Magic Write later expanded across Canva’s platform. The new Brand Voice augments Magic Write with consistent adherence to an organization’s tone. Users upload the style they want any generated text to mimic to their linked Brand Kit folder and the AI text composer will refer to it for any future writing tasks assigned to it. The new Magic Morph tool can add some flair to the text by substituting the colors and textures of text and shapes.
Canva Shield, a new collection of content moderation, prompt filtering, and reporting tools, is watching over all of these new features. For enterprise customers, Canva Shield also includes indemnification, providing additional peace of mind for organizations creating content with AI. Canva, perhaps aware that the volume of generative AI options might overwhelm potential users, has already released the Canva Assistant, a search engine leveraging generative AI to help users find designs and suggest tools from Canva’s library.
“The future of design will be determined by human creativity but will also be fueled by unprecedented levels of AI innovation,” said Canva head of AI Danny Wu. “Creators are at the heart of our community, so we fully embrace our responsibility to ensure that we’re offering them AI-powered tools that are firmly grounded in transparency, as well as ethical and fair practices every step of the way.”
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