The $US165 billion ($247 billion) graphic-design heavyweight, Adobe, and Australian design software maker Canva are locked in mortal combat, and the generational divide between the incumbent and the upstart was evident at their respective product launches this month.

While Adobe’s annual summit in Las Vegas had all the trappings befitting an established technology heavyweight – celebrity speakers, lots of clients in their business best – Canva’s event, held in Sydney’s Barangaroo, stuck to the strong start-up vibes.

Canva’s founding team of Cliff Obrecht (left), Melanie Perkins, and Cameron Adams at their conference in Sydney last week.Credit:Louie Douvis

Forget khaki pants or suits, Canva executives took to the stage in sneakers with light-up soles or three-piece yellow fluoro outfits with mesh tops, and all the pizzazz that would fit right into a Vegas show.

The Atlassian founders who attended the conference, Scott Farquhar and Mike Cannon-Brookes, looked like the old guard of tech entrepreneurs in their jeans – and in Cannon-Brookes’ case, his signature Rabbitohs cap – in an audience of sequins, fluoro wigs and glitter.

Meanwhile, at Adobe’s summit, screenwriter Aaron Sorkin, of West Wing and A Few Good Men fame, seemed perplexed to be at the graphic design and imagery company’s annual shindig to talk about creativity.

“This is a conference about technology, what in hell am I doing here, OK? Honestly. I don’t know how to use Adobe,” Sorkin told a crowd of about 10,000 people in a conference centre below the Venetian Resort’s faux canals and streetscapes.

And he was uneasy with artificial intelligence, the clear theme of both the Adobe and Canva conferences. “I think you’re going to enjoy things done by a human more,” Sorkin said.

AI has the potential to be a blessing or a curse for the likes of Adobe and Canva, with each keen to integrate its prowess into their offerings. Adobe has unveiled a powerful new AI image-generation tool called Firefly, while Canva has unleashed its own AI image generator.

Graphic design is one of the most exposed industries to the inexorable march of AI. Tools such as Craiyon, Midjourney and DALL·E2 already let anyone create high-quality images from a simple text prompt. It has left Adobe, known for graphics software such as Photoshop and Illustrator, with a new challenge.

Rather than having to contend with smaller competitors such as Canva (worth $US25.6 billion), which makes simple graphic-design tools, both firms have to contend with AI potentially eating their lunch.

Aaron Sorkin: “I think you’re going to enjoy things done by a human more.”Credit:Steven Siewert

And so at overlapping conferences 12,425 kilometres away from each other, the two companies – which both denied the event scheduling was anything other than a coincidence – made remarkably similar pitches.

Adobe last week unveiled Firefly, an image-generating tool, and an expansion of Sensei, an AI assistant already built into its marketing apps. The company hopes to let users turn photos and physical sketches into professional-looking graphics, seamlessly expand existing illustrations and do movie-style CGI video editing with just a text prompt.

A marketer could ask Sensei what their audience is interested in, create an AI-generated email and discount offer, and tweak it based on their responses. But for now, the most advanced AI tool at its disposal is a beta version of Firefly to make images, which is an already crowded space.

Adobe is trying to differentiate itself with safety. It has tried to weed out biased images and trained its image generator on primarily stock pictures it has the rights to, while avoiding copyright owned by others. Asked why clients would care, given it is hard to prove that an AI tool was trained on a given image, Adobe’s Asia Pacific regional boss, Simon Tate, is blunt: “Well, they won’t care if they don’t care about being sued.”

(Getty Images, for example, has sued Stability AI, which makes a rival image generator, claiming it had used millions of its images without permission. But that claim and other AI lawsuits have not been tested.)

Meanwhile, Canva is hoping its approach to AI will keep its mostly Millennial audience – precisely the group that would pick up any new AI tools to hit the market – satisfied.

Canva has announced product updates that include new AI functions for its Visual Suite design tools. These include its copywriting assistant, Magic Write, text translation to 100 languages as well as Magic Design, Edit and Eraser for generating personalised templates and replacing parts of an image.

Canva co-founder and chief product officer Cameron Adams says the company wants to use the best technology available to help supercharge its offerings.

“AI is not this generic thing that just does everything,” Adams says.

“It’s something that you need to specifically address for your audience for their needs and their pain points. And you need to integrate it in the right way to offer the right experience that lets them do what they need to do.”

In other words, AI will sit alongside humans, not replace them. In Adobe-speak, it will be a “co-pilot”.

But both Adobe and Canva have a lot of work to do to reassure the creatives and graphic designers who, like Sorkin, are nervous.

Ely Greenfield, chief technology officer in Adobe’s digital media business, says Sorkin’s view that a human will always do genuinely creative tasks better is right, and cites West Wing – a program that many critics thought became repetitive in the seasons after Sorkin left – as an example.

“The 301st episode, a junior writer could do that. Maybe tomorrow ChatGPT can do that. I don’t know,” Greenfield says.

“But the next great thing [Sorkin] is doing, ChatGPT is not going to do that.

“Aaron Sorkin is going to do that. He could leverage ChatGPT … in the creative process, just as today, he leverages a typewriter instead of writing the next one on cocktail napkins [as Sorkin famously did for A Few Good Men when he was a waiter].”

Whether Canva and Adobe’s 100 million-plus customers believe that analogy could be a multibillion-dollar test for both businesses.

Reporter Nick Bonyhady travelled as a guest of Adobe.

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