AI future for Affinity software on the cards — Canva CEO all-in on AI tools despite potential backlash from designers

Canva recently acquired Affinity Serif, makers of one of Adobe's most promising professional design software alternatives, sparking questions about the future of Affinity and its design and photo editing software. In a recent interview with The Verge's Nilay Patel, Canva's CEO gave us an idea of what to expect if Canva's philosophy carries over to Affinity.

The biggest take-away from the interview is that Canva's CEO, Melanie Perkins, sees technology like generative AI as another tool to help creative people get the job done. When asked about AI, Perkins focussed on how Canva is using generative AI to democratise design and not devalue it. She dismisses concerns over AI devaluing the work of creatives, looking to the example of background removal tools and generative fill as examples to illustrate how these tools exist to help designers and not replace them.

Further, when addressing the matter of “angry designers today,” Perkins was quick to point to the relationship between Canva and Affinity, suggesting that professionals can, and should, use Affinity to design their elements and use Canva for the layout after the fact.

Canva has always been the tool that does the layout design. You can take your beautiful professionally designed assets, your logos and whatnot, and then you can lay them out beautifully in Canva as a template...Affinity is about creating all of those assets for professional designers. (via The Verge)

She goes on to talk about Affinity's community, seemingly recognising that Affinity and Canva have both built up a considerable amount of goodwill with their users and that it would be foolish to squander that as an advantage over Adobe by leaning too hard on generative AI. That said, Perkins sees Affinity's mission as “creating a faster, better alternative” to Adobe's apps, and that would mean at least trying to reach feature parity with Adobe. In the eyes of many users, especially those currently in the Adobe ecosystem, that means at least some AI features.

Throughout the interview, it's made clear that Canva isn't shy about using AI, so it's not entirely out of the realm of possibility to expect an AI background removal tool or generative fill alternative in a future Affinity release, although it seems as though Canva and Affinity will approach AI in Affinity with care.

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