Canva makes it easy for people to create anything they need, whether that’s a new logo or an eye-catching presentation. The company has released a brand new tool that can change the way people work. It’s called Magic Write and it feels like the beginning of real change. Whether you’re designing graphics or sharing videos, there won’t be a single part of your workflow that goes untouched.
Canva wanted to branch out and give their users the ability to create media-rich documents, so they created Canvas Docs. The star feature is Magic Write, which was created out of a need for better visuals. This will address frustrated customers who can’t use Word due to its formatting limitations. The rest of Canva Docs has the same design as other Canva tools like Social Media Designer, Decks, and Whiteboard.
Canva Docs is a new word processing tool that uses the same block-oriented visual approach as other design tools. This gives anyone can a quick way to create a document. Unlike MS Word and Google Docs, Canva Docs doesn’t rely on plain text or headers – instead, it uses custom graphical headers that quickly establish the purpose of the document.
For the simplest way to create an article, Canva Docs is a great option. There’s no need to learn HTML code or get bogged down in settings like card dimensions and text colors. It only takes seconds to add content, too! Magic Write is simple: When you click the Add button on a blank page, it will automatically generate coherent text that follows what you write in the prompt. You’ve created new interactive articles with GPT3 before, right? Well, this is like that.
Magic Write is based on GPT3, which was developed by the partnership of Canva and OpenAI. “One of the reasons we were keen to partner with them,” said Adams, “is their fantastic technology and the models that drive machine learning.” The applications for Magic Write are currently limited – hopefully the integration with the Canva Docs app will do much to bridge that gap.
GPT3 will be available in Canva Docs, Adams says. “It’s the culmination of figuring out what users need and how they’ll use it.” He continues: “We’re always looking for ways to bring something new to the table, or find an easy way to do something that people are constantly doing.”
Sometimes it’s tough to come up with new ideas for a writing project. One way to do this is to come up with contexts that you’re not comfortable in so that you can have a fresh perspective.
Canva Docs is drastically different from GPT3 or the latest ChatGPT that’s taking the world by storm. The prompt you write in Canva won’t produce a full document on climate change or an exhaustive recipe book or a movie script. Instead, Magic Write is designed to break your writer’s block, just like our other design templates do when people get “designer’s block.” Adams says they know that looking at a blank page creates fear for even the most professional writers. “It can be the point where a lot of people just throw up their hands and walk away,” he says.
That’s where Magic Write comes in. It’s a smart writing app designed to empower people to create texts with their own ideas and opinions. “That’s probably the most important point for us,” Adams says. “And that’s why we’ve gone with the model we’ve tuned for that length and for those types of topics.”
Adams is referring to the 1,500 character limit in Magic Write’s results. It’s designed to give you short, quick prompts like “the best 5 most delicious pancakes ever” or “5 facts about climate change”. The AI is also tailored to more practical topics like “write me an employment cover letter to apply for a job at NASA”.
Aww, this is so cute!
If you’ve already experimented with ChatGPT, you know how powerful it can be. It has the potential to create complex pieces out of thin air–far more complex than Magic Write can. While I understand Adams’ logic to use AI as a helper instead of creator, I’m not convinced that limiting its output to short answers is the best strategy. If you want to be able to ask whatever you want and go into a lot of detail, why would you try to trim your post?’
The content goes here.
At this point, GPT3 is probably not as good as ChatGPT. Or maybe it’s even better than GPT3. Either way, we think it can replace Magic Write and do everything you need to do.
It might not be hard to imagine a not-so-distant future in which writers and designers are essentially editors who curate a group of AIs to create content.
Over the next five years, Adams admits that what we think of as designing tools will continue to evolve. He predicts that AI will become a crucial part of the equation. It might start with AI giving you creative paths to explore and then iterating until it hits on something you find appealing. Or, it might be something more collaborative and hands-on, as he suggests, in which the productivity software “proactively responds to you.”
Adam has said in previous interviews that he doesn’t want Canva Docs to go down the same path as Clippy. But he does see a future where AI works more faithfully with you as a collaborator, rather than just relying on you to manually interact with it every time. It’s a good comparison; even if Canva staff hate it. Clippy failed because it was dumb and annoying. Yet AI is finding its way toward a reality of sentient autonomy — one in which it can collaborate with creative professionals like you on an equal level, rather than just engaging your input when necessary to make decisions internally.
“I think that’s probably the most exciting area for us because then it really becomes a partnership between you suggesting things,creating things and taking input from the AI that just bubbles up ideas to you” he tells me. “It can be almost like you’re talking to someone else on the other side.” I agree with him. I see AIs becoming your very own creative agency or film crew or animation studio with this generation of humans sitting in the director chair guiding it to bring our often-complex ideas into form.
The company started with the ultimate goal of enabling everyone to become a designer. Even if we create an unbelievably streamlined user interface, the idea always has some kind of barrier to the final product. I think Canva inadvertently started a journey toward that reality by trying to eliminate all barriers.
