Fast Facts: Canva and Open AI

Nyari Dori
3 min readJun 18, 2023

A Brief Overview

The Australian-based graphic design platform, Canva, has been actively elevating its enterprise business offerings, primarily with the recent launch of Canva Docs. Part of the comprehensive Visual Worksuite released in September 2022, this latest feature is heavily reliant on generative AI, seamlessly integrating the company’s text-to-image beta developed on Stable Diffusion. Alongside this, Canva has introduced Magic Write, an AI-driven copywriting assistant that leverages OpenAI’s GPT-3. While Canva and OpenAI have not formally declared a partnership, they have been closely working together to refine the Magic Write use case for Canva’s platform.

Despite the absence of an official announcement, Canva has been actively working with OpenAI to incorporate advanced AI technologies into its services. OpenAI, a pre-eminent entity in AI research and deployment, was founded in 2015 by a cadre of tech luminaries, including Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Ilya Sutskever, Greg Brockman, Wojciech Zaremba, and John Schulman. With a mission to develop artificial general intelligence for the benefit of humanity, OpenAI has been instrumental in pushing the frontiers of AI technology.

To this end, Canva has integrated OpenAI’s revolutionary GPT-3 technology into its Magic Write feature. This AI-powered copywriting assistant is capable of generating diverse content, from social media posts to blog articles. In parallel, Canva Docs has benefited from the integration of OpenAI’s text-to-image beta, built on Stable Diffusion. This feature offers users the unique ability to create images from text descriptions.

The Magic Write tool, in particular, has been crafted to optimize content generation. By harnessing OpenAI’s GPT-3 language model, the feature is equipped to generate media-centric documents swiftly, including meeting agendas and marketing strategies. This user-friendly tool allows users to write a prompt and generate an applicable template. Alternatively, they can modify the generated text to fit different formats, such as translating a block of text into bullet points or paraphrasing to shorten a document.

Although there is no available information about future projects between Canva and OpenAI, the continued integration of AI technologies into Canva’s offerings is likely. The recent innovations, particularly in Canva Docs and the Magic Write feature, have shown the potential of AI technologies to enhance product performance and introduce unique features to users.

It is pertinent to mention the thriving partnership between Microsoft and OpenAI that has been progressing since 2016. The significant investment from Microsoft has bolstered OpenAI’s independent research, fostering the development of AI that is “safe, useful and powerful.” This alliance sets a precedent for the continued collaboration between Canva and OpenAI, hinting at an exciting future for AI in design technology.

In summary, the collaboration between Canva and OpenAI, though not formally recognized, has yielded considerable innovation. By incorporating OpenAI’s advanced AI technologies, Canva has successfully enhanced its product suite, offering improved performance and unique features to its users. As we anticipate further technological integrations, this collaborative endeavor promises an exciting journey towards the future of AI-powered design.

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