Design Revolution: Canva's AI-Powered Innovations Unleashed

0:00Gone are the days when design was a really complicated endeavor. At least that's what Canva is telling us right now with a bunch of new AI features they're rolling out. I think Canva right now has over 150 million users every month, and they've been on kind of the front line of making really complex design tasks simple. That's kind of what they do, right? Like I mentioned in the intro, you know, Adobe has very complex tools that can do really sophisticated things. But Canva makes a lot of that much more simple and can still do a lot of the complex stuff, if I'm being 100 % honest. in any case it now seems that they're really upping the ante with the integration of some AI image generation tools that they're bringing in and I think you know giving this a little bit of context last year Canva introduced its community to what it called Magic Media which was essentially an AI driven image generator that kind of brings to life the world the words that you type right I mean pretty much what what it is is something like Dolly and I think it might even be plugged directly into Dolly so I don't believe this was anything built in-house and I have their own AI model.

1:00They're just, you know, using an API to something like Dolly. So it was so-so. In any case, it, you know, it was not just for images, but now apparently it can do video too, which is very interesting. In a statement, Canvas shared its goals behind the innovation saying, quote, our mission has always been to make complex things simple and tapping into exciting new ways to empower our community to bring their ideas and imaginations to life is an important part of that. So if it wasn't like I'm, you know, I'm in the camp saying anything that you do with AI and video right now is impressive because there's not a lot of people doing it.

1:34But essentially Canva users now have three different image generating apps. They can use Canva's Magic Media, OpenAI's Dolly, and then Google Cloud's Imogen. So they kind of have these three. So I guess they must have their own kind of in-house thing with Canva's Magic Media. Canva has shared some statistics about that in particular, and they've said that in less than a year since it launched, their community has created around 290 million images using Magic Media and has used them for a bunch of different applications from business presentations to logos, social media posts, all that kind of stuff.

2:09the promise of AI driven design on Canva is they're kind of trying to make this simple essentially when you can't find the visuals you just type in whatever you want and then they'll you know essentially generate something you know you can say something like black and white illustration of someone baking a cake or something more complex and then essentially they can do that now it's kind of interesting because this I feel like is a really good integration of AI tools right people are already doing a lot of graphic design projects on here they're building templates they're building you know flyers they're they're generating images for their websites for their podcasts for like everything and sometimes like they have a little tool on there where you can essentially like search for images or like graphics but like they mentioned sometimes you don't get exactly what you want and so it's like well why don't i just tell an ai to generate exactly what i'm going for and i think that's when this really kind of fills in where nothing else exists.

3:00I think the benefit of this tech is kind of that like professionals, marketers, content creators, small business owners, all that don't really need to sift through countless stock images to find one that they like. They can pretty much just create the exact one, right? And outline the exact visual. So I think that is a bit of a no brainer as far as like an application. Canva has made sure that the integration of the AI tools is fairly seamless. It's not too complicated. I'll give them credit for that. Essentially, users can create, edit, and also fine-tune their images without having to hop between different tools or platforms, which is very nice.

3:36Enhancements have also been made to Magic Media's text image capabilities, including the ability to generate similar-looking variations of an image, similar to what you'd see with, like, Mid Journey, right, and how you can essentially, say, to create new variations of the same image. so moreover i think the spectrum of styles that magic media now supports is a little bit bigger they have photos they have neon they have concept art and they offer users a bunch of different options to choose from so again right it's pretty much just like fancy prompt engineering i wouldn't be surprised if they uh you know just like you click a button to make it like a neon piece of art but in reality it just adds the word neon into the prompt that is feeding to the engine right so So I think in an age where technology is like pretty much AI has this like problem right now with ethics and whatnot, Canva is trying to be proactive in this.

4:31Essentially, they emphasized that they are ensuring that the tools they offer are safe and responsible. You know, I know that sounds like not very specific, but I think to achieve this, they've kind of invested in a bunch of different safety measures, including automated reviews to prevent the generation of unsafe imagery and a feedback loop where users can report problematic outputs. I mean, this is just, this is normal stuff you'd expect. So I don't actually, I don't think this is anything groundbreaking that they've done here. In any case, I think by partnering with some different industry leaders, Google Cloud, OpenAI, Canva's trying to leverage other apps as well that also they can add into there.

5:12I'm not sure if they're doing this because they're not very confident in their own tool being good right i think this is kind of a play you'd see from a company that's like hey we made this thing it's definitely in beta it's like you know not incredible but if it doesn't have what you want like you know just go use google or opening eye that's kind of the vibe i get from it but maybe they're just trying to be you know super nice and give you a lot of options in any in any case recognizing the ongoing debate about generative ai and copyright issues canva is also working to give some resources and insights to address concerns um there it's kind of funny they said that they want to be a quote-unquote force for good um and to innovate responsibly but like again that seems like not very specific and they haven't really made any specific promises there so i mean it seems well-intentioned but i'm not gonna give them any credit until they say something specific they've actually done so for people that are eager to explore some of these these new digital design tools canva's magic media along with imogen and dolly are available in canva's app marketplace so you can use that on desktop ios android i think this is a really a really uh great use case canva is an awesome partner to have in this ai space um and i think there's like the use case is very obvious they're not making a big stretch to try to include ai into their platform so i will give them that i do think that what they're what they're doing is really along the right lines they're they're you know essentially focusing on what they should my only thing is you know maybe i wish they had of put a bigger budget or focused more and went a little bit harder on making something that was really really polished more like mid-journey but i mean mid-journey is like the number one so it's kind i guess it's kind of hard to compare um them to that especially when that's not like the only thing they do but in any case they do have a big budget they are a big company so i do believe they might be able to do a little bit better on this but you know time will tell and it'll be very interesting to see if like canva goes from being a design company to like a major player in, you know, a foundational AI model.

7:07I think that'd be really exciting and a cool prospect. So we'll definitely be following them and keeping you updated on that.