Of all of the industries currently experiencing a revolution driven by artificial intelligence, the creative and design sectors are amongst those most vulnerable to massive disruption.
But while creatives are increasingly turning to recent generative AI-powered tools that may turn text into images and videos, the software firms that sell these products say AI itself needs a little bit of a redesign.
“AI promises to do everything for you and magically read your mind, but the reality is you still have to interact with it,” says Cameron Adams, co-founder and chief product officer of design platform Canva. “Getting something out of your head and explaining it is an art and a skill. And it’s not something many of us are wired for.”
Since generative AI tools like ChatGPT began making waves in late 2022, firms like Canva, Adobe, and Figma have added more AI tools to spice up creativity productivity. It’s grow to be easier and cheaper to design more assets – at a time when the industry is being asked to create many more images, text, and videos for various audience segments, geographies, and platforms like social and the net.
But there are still many points of friction. Creative professionals are using AI to create all of those assets, but often the tools are still clunkily integrated into the documents or presentations wherein these materials must appear. Recently, design software firms have been specializing in seamlessly integrating these tools into their product portfolios. “We don’t see it as a single feature,” says Noah Levin, vp of product design at Figma. “We see it more as a technology that you apply in different ways across your entire product.”
Australia-based Canva has added AI-powered features including text generation tools that leverage OpenAI’s algorithms, a text-to-image tool, and an AI background remover. Since launching Canva’s AI-powered Visual Suite, the corporate says it has focused heavily on ensuring your complete AI-powered design process is as consistent as possible.
“We’re seeing more and more people integrating it into their workflows,” says Adams. Increased use of AI offerings has helped Canva gain 90 million recent lively users per 30 days, and the corporate’s AI products have been used 5 billion times thus far.
Adams says the generative AI boom in 2023 has led to a variety of hype and area of interest tools for creative professionals, but that many are struggling to integrate these recent tools into their work. AI text input fields aren’t particularly intuitive for users, he notes.
To make things easier, Canva has created prompts in tools like Magic Media that help users create more precise creative assets using AI. For example, a creator can type in a prompt like “man eating delicious pepperoni pizza” and select the style direction Canva offers, which ranges from dreamy to watercolor to anime, in addition to aspect ratios like square, landscape, and portrait.
“One of the responsibilities we have as product developers is that we have to make AI accessible,” says Adams. “We had to integrate it into our products and into people’s workflows in a meaningful way.”
For design-focused software firms, democratizing the creative process is critical, especially because the creative process has grow to be increasingly collaborative, with concepts being brainstormed by a bigger group of stakeholders fairly than simply designers who previously worked in isolated studios.
“When multiple people work together, better concepts emerge,” says Figma’s Levin.
Figma’s strategy is to lower the design floor to provide more customers the tools to take part in the creative process, but in addition to boost the ceiling with more sophisticated offerings for the experts.
“We want to bring more people into the field who have never worked as designers before and who I think see a lot of value in learning how to communicate visually,” Levin says. “But I also want the experts, the many millions of people we can serve, to feel like they can do their jobs better thanks to AI.”
No matter how AI technology evolves, Adobe says humans have to stay on top of designing creative assets. “I don’t think these models are creative,” says Ely Greenfield, chief technology officer at Adobe. “I think they’re production assistants.”
Among all of the negative headlines AI generates, few industries have come under as much criticism as image generators. Google needed to temporarily disable the corporate’s image generator feature, Gemini, after the tool was found to perpetuate racial and gender stereotypes. AI image generator Midjourney recently announced that it had blocked users from creating false political images within the run-up to the 2024 US presidential election.
“We put a lot of work into making sure that the images we create do not cause unintended harm or create bias,” Greenfield says.
Adobe Firefly relies entirely on licensed content, which helps limit the biases that may creep into the corporate’s dataset. And while there have been some complaints concerning the content generated in Firefly, Adobe says it has feedback mechanisms in place that allow users to boost those concerns so that they will be addressed. Since Adobe launched Firefly a 12 months ago, users have created over 6.5 billion images using the generative AI tool.
When asked why image generators are sometimes at the middle of ethical questions surrounding AI, Greenfield says that when a data-driven aspect of labor is automated, people don’t are inclined to bemoan the repetitive tasks they’ve handed over to machines. But because people value art, there’s quite a bit more at stake emotionally when technology intervenes in the way in which it’s made.
“Something that potentially impacts the ability of artists to make art and make a living, I think, touches different parts of our brains and our hearts,” Greenfield says.
