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Comment by lionkor | Hacker News Reader

Finally, a company that adds AI to their product and then IPOs - I can't wait to see what groundbreaking stickers the AI will come up with, so I can really level up my birthday cards.

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To be fair, Canva's product is uniquely a good fit for Gen AI. Casuals who just want the end result without trying to learn all the complicated photo/video editing techniques.

Or, “people who think they can express themselves in a medium without actually working in that medium” in the words of Ted Chiang.

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-weekend-essay/why-ai-i...

Music producers have been doing it with sample-based music spanning hundreds of genres since the 80s. So yes, you can.

The Gen AI company they just acquired seems to be making their own model that, amongst other things, can generate coherent and heavily stylized text. For a platform that makes logos, branding, marketing material etc that seems like a natural fit.

Creating elements like that even with Canva's existing tools would generally require a graphic designer or someone with that skillset, or even worse - an agency. All of those options can be prohibitively expensive relative to the benefit they provide.

Yep I use it quite a bit as well as Buffer's AI assistant to help me rewrite texts, or at least give me interesting synonyms. It's probably the only venue where I can say "maybe AI will help people instead of ruining their jobs"

Casuals who just want the end result

I am not a "casual." I am a human being.

Nah. Dirty causal.

Well of course, what else are they supposed to do?

Put AI tools in an optional higher tier and have absolutely nobody that consciously upgrades to that tier?

I can think of an even simpler answer

Simply don't have AI, the product works well and has a very solid monetization model.

True, but the investors want to AI all things things. Just read the blog of the formerly thoughtful Tyler Cowen to get a sense of this.

If they wanted to be ahead of the competition, they would offer "handcrafted human designs for premium customers"

Interestingly enough, Canva has a mechanism where artists sell their templates on other sites like Etsy then grant access to customers... which Canva is getting none of the pie.

That doesn't scale.

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