This week’s AI news focuses on two issues of great interest to indie authors. I will start with Canva. In part because I haven’t talked about them for a while. And partly because this news picks up from the last time I did talk about them. Which was last year, when they made a lot of people unhappy by increasing the price of its Pro offering from a flat $120 per year for a team license to $10 a month per team member.
ALLi News Editor Dan Holloway
Canva is, of course, an invaluable tool for indie authors and for those we work with. It is not just used for designing covers, but bookmarks, banners, and advertising campaigns.
Canva’s AI Investment
The reason behind the increase was to enable Canva to invest in the development of AI tools. I will confess, I had completely forgotten that. Until this week, when I read that Canva has now launched the big one of those tools. And that is the availability of an image generation tool. This sits alongside other new AI tools including coding and spreadsheet options.
As an aside, if you want proof that AI really is everywhere, we just learned that last month ChatGPT was the most downloaded app globally.
Law Professors vs. Meta
And let’s end by coming back to the ongoing saga of rights holders against Meta. A group of law professors has written an amicus brief supporting the rights holders in this case. I suppose I could ask ChatGPT to explain to me what an amicus brief is (it always makes me think of the John Grisham classic The Pelican Brief), but I won’t. My understanding is that it’s like expert witness testimony that’s voluntarily submitted rather than being called for by one of the parties.
The brief argues that Meta’s use of copyrighted works is not “transformative.” It further suggests that the fact the results of the training will be directly in competition with the originals and that Meta being a for-profit company also indicate that the use should not be permitted.
Balance requires me to note that other amicus briefs giving other opinions have at various times been filed.
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