Canva enters the artificial intelligence arms race

The start-up darling says its new features – five years in the making – will avoid the gaffes and misinformation that have plagued products such as ChatGPT.

Canva co-founders Cameron Adams, Cliff Obrecht and Melanie Perkins. Picture: John Feder

Australian design software giant Canva has unveiled a new suite of AI-powered tools and its co-founders, Melanie Perkins, Cliff Obrecht and Cameron Adams say they’re confident they can avoid the gaffes and issues of bias and misinformation that have plagued the likes of ChatGPT and Google’s AI effort Bard.

At a flashy launch event in Barangaroo on Thursday, the Sydney-based company showed off what it describes as the next generation for its online visual communication platform, which has racked up more than 125 million users globally.

The new AI features include “Magic Design”, a tool in which users can upload any image and automatically generate a design, “Beat Sync” which can automatically match video to a soundtrack and “Magic Write”, an AI-powered copywriting assistant similar to ChatGPT.

Ms Perkins, the company’s chief executive, said Canva has been working on its artificial intelligence functionality for five years – well before ChatGPT and Google’s Bard captured the public’s imagination. She said AI specialists are embedded in teams across Canva’s workforce.

“We’ve been investing in this for five years now, so it’s certainly not new to us,” Ms Perkins said of Canva’s artificial intelligence capabilities.

“The technologies are extraordinarily exciting to see and unlock so many possibilities for what we’re able to do; it works really well.

“Being able to reduce the friction when people are trying to create a design has been sort of our bread and butter for a decade. And because we know our customers so well and we know so deeply what they want and where their pain points are and what frustrates them, the removal of that problem is really exciting.

“It’s just sort of doing what we’ve always been doing but now aided by better technology.”

One of the key issues currently facing ChatGPT and its competitors has been its lies, insults and “hallucinations” which critics argue mean the technology is not ready for prime time.

Canva co-founder Cliff Obrecht. Picture: John Feder

Google’s parent company, Alphabet, last month had $US100bn ($144.5bn) wiped out in market value when its AI chatbot shared false information in a promotional video, while ChatGPT – which isn’t connected to the internet – often returns incorrect answers.

Ms Perkins said Canva was aware of the concerns affecting the nascent technology and as a result has “potentially overindexed” when it comes to thorny issues like trust and safety.

The company is also is ensuring that artists receive royalties if their work is used in content generated by artificial intelligence.

She said Canva was playing it safe by ensuring that political topics and medical topics, for example, were off limits.

“We really want to err on the side of caution as we release this,” she said. “We have indexed very heavily towards customer safety.”

Canva on Thursday announced it had passed 125 million users who have collectively created more than 15 billion designs on its platform. US-based rival Adobe this week announced similar generative AI functionality, dubbed “Firefly”, that will let users type commands to quickly modify images.

At its “Create” event in Barangaroo, which Canva said was live streamed by more than 1.5 million users globally, the company announced new brand management features for marketing teams including the ability to create a brand kit with logos, colours, fonts, icons, imagery, graphics, and brand guidelines.

As The Australian previously reported Ms Perkins categorically ruled out Canva joining companies such as Atlassian, Meta and Amazon in laying off workers, declaring that its large cash reserves and slow rate of hiring would save it from joining the worsening “tech wreck” tearing through the local sector.

“We’re in a fortunate position, we’re not doing any lay-offs and we have no plans to whatsoever. We can categorically say we will not do lay-offs,” Ms Perkins said.

“We’ve been profitable for six years, we have a large cash balance, our growth is accelerating and we’re in a good position.”