MANILA, PHILIPPINES – When Australian design platform Canva unveiled its artificial intelligence (AI) tool, its founders emphasized projecting both ambition and a little care.
The startup, which at one point was valued at $40 billion, recently launched its own version of text-to-image technology, a tool to create 10-slide presentations with text and graphics, and even mass-produced I showed you the copywriting tools that can do it. Bullet points for different topics. Just type it and Canva promises to create that image or presentation for you.
These features launched the same week that Adobe launched Firefly, a platform with generative AI tools. Interestingly, Canva revealed the product ahead of his long-awaited Microsoft 365 Copilot launch. Microsoft 365 Copilot promises to create a presentation with just a few prompts and instructions.
Canva CEO Melanie Perkins has revealed that the company, which initially struggled to attract investors, aims to become one of the most valuable companies in the world. bottom. AI will take them there.
“It was pretty hard to get anyone to believe in our wildest dreams. We didn’t believe there was a market that would allow us to design,” said Perkins.
One investor said, “I don’t think we’ll be in this round. We’re really concerned about how the market will shape.
Early Canva Melanie Perkins
The generative AI market is expected to develop into a $42 billion industry, according to PitchBook, a financial data and software company. In 2022 alone, he has earned 57.8% of venture capital investments.
However, in the fierce competition in the AI space, Canva has both clear goals and no limits.
“We want to enable AI responsibly,” said Perkins.
smoke, mirrors and magic
Canva co-founder Cameron Adams compared the potential of AI to magic.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke
But the power of AI doesn’t come out of nowhere. As technology researchers point out, AI output simply reflects and adjusts data publicly available on the internet, from facts, prejudices, and even lies.
From simple prompts, AI-generated images of Pope Francis in a puffy coat and even a series of images of former US President Donald Trump in prison have gone viral.
Media watchdogs have likewise warned that AI such as ChatGPT can mimic human prose and lie through its “massive language model.”
The MIT Technology Review is outspoken about the issue, calling such large language model chatbots “notorious bullshit.”
“Technology is simply not ready to be used in this way at this scale. AI language models are notoriously bullshit and often present lies as facts. They predict the next word in a sentence It’s great at doing things, but it doesn’t know what the sentence actually means, so it’s very dangerous to combine it with a search where getting the facts right is important,” said MIT Technology. reviews said.
In an interview with Rappler, Adams emphasized that Canva takes policing of harmful text and images “very seriously” through its “trust and safety team.”
“We have a team that constantly looks at what people put into their generators. If so, we apply a set of filters and logic,” says Adams.
Adams also said their backend makes sure people aren’t asking for “bad things.” Canva “denies it at all” when users try to conjure up harmful images or text.
Unlike most of the AI arms race, Canva is unique because it started as a tool for educators and non-governmental organizations and was essentially created as a design platform for non-designers.
Education is also at the core of the founder. Co-founder Cliff Obrecht was a teacher before becoming an entrepreneur. Perkins taught design at a university.
“We have a long history with these educational products. We want our educational products to be really safe. [for] student. We have a long history of working responsibly in these areas and putting in place the processes and tools necessary to provide a safe place to live,” he said.
When asked how much of Canva’s capital expenditure is spent on AI and safety, Adams simply replied, “a lot.”
Canva guardrail testing
Canva said it completely refuses to create content about medical advice, primarily “political” content, or even financial advice.
The terms of its AI products do not include “shocking content” such as misleading, providing legal advice, creating contracts or legally binding obligations, nudity, obscene gestures, or profane subject matter. User-generated content that is intended to generate
Rappler has found that Canva refuses to generate these images and presentations in most cases. Refuse to create images or presentations about COVID-19 and the pandemic.
Also, Canva’s text-to-image feature refuses to create images of world leaders such as US President Joe Biden and China’s President Xi Jinping.
However, some of the output is skewed. For example, if you enter the words “President with Drag Queen”, the AI will prefer to display an image of the President of the United States, even if it is not specified in the prompt. One of the options pops up an image that looks a lot like former President Donald Trump.
When creating images about royalty, the AI will generate a distorted image of the British royal family without any user input.
When it comes to Philippines-specific issues, Canva’s AI tools reject most requests for images of Filipino politicians, including President Ferdinand Marcos Jr., former President Rodrigo Duterte, and former Vice President Reni Robredo.
Canva also declined to create images of the late former president Cory Aquino and her late husband Ninoy.
But while its text-to-image feature doesn’t create images of Aquinos and the People Power rebellion, its AI-powered presentation does create images of the Marcos dictatorship. That output only roughly addresses the problem. Rappler found the generated bullet points to be historically accurate, though lacking in detail.
For example, you can provide the exact dates of the EDSA People Power Rebellion from February 22-25, 1986. He could also summarize the events of the peaceful uprising and the end of the Marcos regime in one slide. Rappler specifically chose to test this topic because he is one of the historical events that the disinformation network has repeatedly tried to change. (Read: Fact Check: EDSA, Martial Law, Lies About Marcos)
Prior to the test, Adams told Rappler that AI is “a reflection of society” and that Canva is working to reduce bias.
“[A]And depending on what part of society utilizes AI models, you get different things out of it. So you have to be very aware of what you’re giving it and that’s what we did. We thought a lot about it and made sure the AI models we were using to create our content were reflective of the world we live in,” Adams said.
Canva uses Stable Diffusion for its text-to-image functionality and OpenAI’s ChatGPT for its text generation functionality. Canva reminds users that its AI features are “new and improved” and allows users to submit reports if they think the design is incorrect.
Cautious pundits and AI ethics lobbyists criticize this approach in generative AI.
“OpenAI, the creators of the hit AI chatbot ChatGPT, has always emphasized that this is still just a research project and is constantly improving with people’s feedback. Despite warnings that it may be unreliable, that doesn’t stop Microsoft from integrating it into newer versions of Bing.”
Switch jobs and make students lazy?
The rest of AI’s players have grand promises of dramatic industry change that could even result in worker replacement, but Canva implies they aren’t going to. .
Instead, it’s positioning itself as a jumping-off point to build for people who spent hours staring at a blank page.
For example, a student looking to create a presentation on the basics of stock investing can create a 10-slide presentation with subtopics, bullet points, and even a conclusion in seconds.
Canva’s current functionality does not give you what to say in your presentation. It is still the user who enters the details.
At the Canva Create event, Perkins said the new feature will further help users “come up with ideas faster.”
She also said graphic designers would benefit from Canva’s new features.
The company also makes sure it’s not in direct competition with Google or Microsoft.
When asked about the optics of the competition, Obrecht emphasized that Canva is all about “visual communication for everyone.”
Canva’s growth prospects
It took Canva nearly five years to reach its first 10 million users since it launched in 2013. But when Visual launched his work suite in 2022, he added 10 million users in just 30 days. To date, it has 125 million users.
Canva has over $1.4 billion in annual revenue and has been profitable for six years in a row. The company says it does not need to raise any more money or conduct an initial public offering, despite its clear goal of becoming one of the world’s most valuable and profitable companies. claim.
The reason we clicked is because it consolidates all your visual needs into one platform, including stock photography, design templates, and content management. Users no longer have to jump from one platform to another to import different files.
Canva has also acquired visual services companies like Pixabay, Pexels, Kaleido.ai, Smartmockups and Flourish to further enhance its offerings.
The AI race is also using the same integration approach to attract more users. Canva is he one of the first companies to publish both text AI and visual AI on his one platform.
“Reaching 1 billion users has definitely been used as a milestone internally. Let’s go,” Adams said. – Rappler.com
Disclosure: Rappler was invited by Canva to their ‘Canva Create’ event last March 21-23 in Sydney.
