As part of its 10th birthday celebrations, web-based design platform Canva is releasing Magic Studio – a new suite of AI-powered design tools that aims to make content creation more accessible to everyone, regardless of previous design experience. Canva describes Magic Studio as “the world’s most comprehensive AI-design platform” for companies and individual users, offering new tools to automate labor-intensive tasks like converting designs to other media formats or instantly editing images with AI.
The package introduces features like Magic Switch, which allows users to convert an existing format to another format, such as converting a blog to an email or social media post without having to manually change the layout or update copy text. This feature can automatically translate your designs More than 100 languages without leaving the page. It’s a great way to create multichannel campaigns from a single design, saving designers time to focus on more demanding tasks.
Canva has also added a new text-to-video capability to its Magic Media tool (formerly known as Text to Image). Powered by Runway AI, you can use the new feature to create text-based instructions or short videos from an existing image uploaded to Canva’s asset library. Videos can be used on stage or exported as MP4 or GIF for use in other projects. Magic Media’s text-to-image tool has been further enhanced to provide a “wider range of style options for any result.” For those looking to try alternative AI image generation apps, OpenAI’s DALL-E and Google’s Image are now available in Canva’s App Market.
Also included in the release are some new photo-editing tools like Magic Grab – which can automatically segment any object in an image by editing, repositioning or resizing it – and Magic Expand, which expands the image outside its frame. Like Adobe’s Generative Enhancement tool for Photoshop. You can find a full list of all the new tools coming Magic Studio on Canva’s website.
Along with its new AI suite, Canva is also introducing Canva Shield — new safety, privacy and security controls for the platform designed to prevent its AI from being used to create unsafe or inappropriate content. Canva Shield is free AI compensation for Canva enterprise customers and gives team admins full control over how Magic Studio products are operated and used in the workplace.
Canva has set aside $200 million to pay users who agree to use their designs to train its AI models.
Finally, Canva has also announced that it will pay $200 million over the next three years to designers who agree to use their content to train the company’s AI models. Participants in the Creator Compensation Program receive an initial bonus, followed by monthly payments as long as their content is used. Canva didn’t provide specific figures, but the company’s co-founder and CPO, Cameron Adams, said on the edge Payments are “determined by a number of factors such as the level of contribution to our content library [and] How many times has it been used.”
Canva does not say whether users will be opted in or out by default. Adams said the new Magic Studio products aren’t trained on Canva creators’ data, and the company is updating its contributor agreement to explain how their data will be used, and that it “provides an early opt-out option.” Adobe announced a similar compensation plan for Adobe Stock contributors last month.
Following previous releases in recent months for its Visual Worksuite and AI-powered brand management tools, Canva is shaping up to be a serious competitor to the likes of Adobe. The company’s accessible design platform currently has 16 million paying subscribers and more than 150 million users worldwide. Adobe has added plenty of new AI features to its own web-based design app, Adobe Express, but it may need to do more to compete with Canva’s growing popularity.
