Canva rolls out AI for companies alongside a $200m creator fund

Canva has unveiled a $200m creator fund which will pay royalties to those who let the global design giant use their work to train its generative AI engine.

Canva co-founders Cliff Obrecht, Cameron Adams and Melanie Perkins.

Canva has launched a $200m fund for creators, paying royalties to those who allow the Australian design giant to use their content to train its relatively new artificial intelligence engine.

The graphic design platform on Thursday announced a number of new tools alongside the fund which allows companies to make use of AI which can, at the delivery of a prompt, generate video, audio, imagery and text for marketing purposes.

Co-founder Cameron Adams told The Australian that Canva believed “human creativity is still being at the centre of design, even with AI coming in, and we see a real strong partnership between people and technology”.

“We would love for contributors to opt into the program. We’re not going to use their data unless they do opt in, and when they do opt in they will start to get royalties from any content that gets used as part of our AI tools,” he said.

Canva has rolled out a new fund for creators who let the company train its AI engine on their designs.

Mr Adams would not share detail about just how much creators would be paid. However, in an email to creators last week, Canva offered an initial bonus payment which “would be at least 20 per cent of your average monthly payment”. That bonus was due to be paid late in October.

The move to open a fund for designers whose products are used to train its generative AI engine arrives more than six months after competitor Adobe announced a similar revenue-share program in March this year. Both Canva and Adobe allow designers the option to opt into the program.

On the new AI tools which form part of a suite called Magic Studio, Mr Adams said Canva had observed in recent years a number of platforms use its design platform for their campaigns.

Canva chief product officer Cameron Adams.

“Normally people think of their brand as their logo and their colours and their fonts. And we now have a section for tone of voice so you can tell us how your brand normally speaks,” he said, referring to a product called Brand Voice.

Juggling tone of voice across all platforms online had become a tricky thing to do for companies, and the new product would allow them to ban certain words and choose a manner in which to speak – be it professionally, casually or with a tinge of humour, he said.

Using AI, the product would be able to apply set tones to blog posts, photos captions or even rewrites of a story or report.

Another tool called Magic Design would be able to scan all content created within Canva to identify trends and design products that kept up with recent fads, Mr Adams said.

Using Canva’s new AI features to change a person’s clothing.

“With Magic Design, we’ll look at what’s trending, what the best design types are for you, how to best communicate your message, whether that’s one page or several pages or it’s a video with music attached to it,” he said.

Another feature allowed a user to move someone’s position in a photo. “Magic grab actually figures out where that person is, what’s behind them and then it lets you move them and you’d be none the wiser about what the original photo look like,” Mr Adams said.

Those types of tools have become common with mobile phone manufacturers; both Google and Samsung offer producers Magic Eraser and Object Eraser respectively, which allows a user to remove items or people from an image.

Canva, which marked its 10th anniversary last month, was now on a mission to grow its business ever further across the globe, Mr Adams said.

Canva’s Magic Studio which includes new AI-powered design tools.

“When we started Canva, back in 2012, the landscape looked very different. There were no easy-to-use design tools and 99 per cent of the world couldn’t create the visual content they needed to engage their customers, and get their ideas out and impacting the world,” he said.

“We think that AI’s ability to remove complexity and to supercharge design will be pivotal for the 99 per cent of office workers who have no design training.

“That’s what we’re focused on for the next 10 years.”

Originally published as Canva rolls out AI for companies alongside a $200m creator fund