Canva bolsters AI offerings, providing copyright indemnity for AI-generated images

Visual communication company Canva has launched an “all-in-one AI design offering” dubbed Magic Studio, with the aim of tailoring design-focused AI tools and technology for the enterprise.

The announcement comes six months after Canva first added AI-powered design tools to its Visual Worksuite, capabilities that the company says have been used more than 3 billion times since their launch.

Magic Studio offers users over 10 new AI tools. They include Magic Design, which allows Canva users to generate videos, presentations, and complete designs from a single text prompt, and Magic Switch, which converts designs into a range of different formats, turning presentations into an executive summary or blog post, for example. This content can also be translated into over 100 different languages.

Users will also have the ability to turn text into engaging photos with the application’s Magic Media feature, and also create videos from an image or text using Gen-2, a video generation AI model by Runway. Other features include Magic Morph — designed to instantly transform words and shapes into new colors, textures, patterns and styles with a simple prompt — and Magic Expand, which can save zoomed-in images or turn a vertical shot horizontal by recovering whatever’s outside the frame.

Additionally, Magic Grab allows users to select and separate any subject in a photo in order to edit, reposition, or resize it. 

Canva has also launched a copywriting assistant called Magic Write, which provides users with the ability to write content in their brand’s tone of voice, in any design or document, by adding guidelines to their Brand Kit ensure the tool generates on-brand content.

Canva is also expanding its application marketplace, providing its customers with access to leading AI tools, including Dall-E, Imagen by Google Cloud, MurfAI, Soundraw and more.

Alongside the new capabilities included in Magic Studio, Canva is also launching a new security product called Canva Sheild, an enterprise-grade collection of trust, safety and privacy controls designed to provide teams and organizations with peace of mind when creating content. Team administrators have full control over how Magic Studio products are enabled and used across the workplace and can toggle these features at any time, based on employee roles.

Canva offers enterprise customers indemnification for AI-generated images

In an approach that mimics the one taken by Adobe and Shutterstock regarding their AI-powered image generators, Canva Shield also includes copyright indemnification for enterprise customers, which the company says will provide additional peace of mind for organizations creating content with AI.

Canva is also committing $200 million over the next three years in creator and AI royalties to compensate creators for use of their data in AI training and, in order to reaffirm the company’s commitment to transparency, Canva will provide creators the choice to opt out of their data being used for training purposes.

Creators who opt into training AI models on their existing content will receive a payment, which takes two forms — an initial bonus payment to creators who are opted in to their data being used, and then ongoing monthly payments. These payments are determined by a range of factors such as the level of contribution to our content library, the number of times it has been used.

At the opening of the company’s new London office in May, when asked by Computerworld about potential conflict of interest between AI generated images and the creative industries, Cameron Adams, Canva’s co-founder and chief product officer, said that innovation in this area should be seen as a good thing as it helps level the creative playing field.

“When we first launched Canva, there was a lot of fear from graphic designers about what Canva would do but, what we’ve seen over the last decade is that actually, democratizing design allows non designers to have better conversations with graphic designers and helps people to realize their ideas much quicker and with much better quality,” he said. “We believe AI is going to have the same impact.”