- Microsoft Paint now has a Copilot AI
- New AI -Painting Tools Includes Cocreator, Picture Creator and Generative Deletion
- Windows adds AI search to find photos using natural language
Microsoft Paint, the humble program you might only call up to a very quick picture crop, gets an AI upgrade thanks to a new Copilot button. Microsoft’s AI assistant can now help create and improve any sketches or MS paint-based visions you love to put in pixels. Currently, the update is limited to Windows insiders, but presumably Microsoft will expand access when they refine the feature.
For those with access, clicking the Copilot button in the paint assignment will be a menu with AI-powered features. It includes image creators that transform text prompt into images using Openais Dall-E model, cocreator that uses AI to combine text recordings with all doodles you make in paint to produce a new kind of art, and generative deletion, like can take objects (or humans) out of a picture without disturbing the background.
This is not the first time paint flirting with AI. By 2023, Microsoft began adding cocreator to paint, followed by generative filling, which allows you to remove or change parts of an image by instructing AI to replace them with something new. This simply organizes all AI tools nicely under the Copilot banner, making it easier to find and use them somewhere.
Paint is only one of the stations that Copilot is creating across Windows. AI is already built into the Windows process line, the edge browser, the Office 365 platform and even some keyboards. That said, AI offers Microsoft Paint with how people can actually use the application. To manufacture and edit images is the whole point of paint; Copilot simply expands these abilities.
Organization Copilot
But this is not just about painting. Microsoft is also rolling up updates to his AI-driven search, which first appeared in preview earlier this month. Until now, AI search only worked with files stored locally on your PC. This new update is also expanded for sky storage, which means you can now find your OneDrive photos just by describing them.
Instead of rolling through endless folders with screenshots and holiday pictures, you can write something like “beach sunset from last summer” and let AI do the rest. It is a small but marked shift towards a more intuitive way to control files.
Paint may not be the most exciting Microsoft tool, but the incorporation of AI tools is remarkable as a development of an app that many assumed Microsoft would give up many years ago. Instead, paint can thrive in the AI era thanks to the very simplicity that has made it appealing for decades.
