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What you need to know
- Microsoft integrates OpenAI’s DALL-E 3 technology into its Paint app.
- The app now features a Cocreator tool that instantly lets users transform ideas into digital art by describing what they’d like to create.
- The results are in line with those of Bing Image Creator.
In the past few months, we’ve seen Microsoft double down on its efforts to integrate AI capabilities across most (if not all) of its products and services. As expected, it was only a matter of time till the effect trickled down to Microsoft Paint.
An earlier report by our Senior Editor, Zac Bowden indicated that Microsoft might have had plans underway to ship AI capabilities to Paint and the Photos app. Well, the company lived up to its promises and added support for image background removal and replacement to the Photos app in early November.
Now, the company is making good on yet another promise by integrating DALL-E 3 technology into its Microsoft Paint app. As you might recall, Microsoft had already begun testing a handful of nifty features in Microsoft Paint with Windows Insiders (Dev and Canary channels), including support for layers, transparency, the addition of a background removal tool, and the Cocreator feature.
While these features were limited to Windows Insiders, a new update for Microsoft Paint adds the Cocreator button as noticed by Windows Latest too, making it available to all Windows 11 users. Through the tool, users can transform ideas into digital art instantly by describing what they’d like to create. Like the Bing Image Creator, the new Microsoft Paint tool will generate a couple of options, allowing you to pick the one that best aligns with what you’d envisioned.
Keep the GPU crisis away from Paint
In the past few months, we’ve seen avid Windows users stoked over the recent AI-baked capabilities Microsoft has been shipping to some of its native apps like Microsoft Photos and Microsoft Paint.
The DALL-E 3 integration into Microsoft Paint is a much-welcomed addition, which is likely to be a hit, much like when the company integrated it into Copliot. Users flooded Copilot’s gate, each trying to leverage the enhanced performance of the tool, which ultimately led to them waiting excruciatingly long hours before they could generate a single image. Microsoft had underestimated the number of users who’d be interested in it but quickly mitigated the issue by adding more GPUs.
Admittedly, I’ve become quite dependent on Copilot and its image generation capabilities, which has led me not to explore more options like Microsoft Paint’s “new” Cocreator tool.
At first glance, everything is pretty straightforward, with the Cocreator visibly embedded at the top right side of the window once you launch the app. By clicking on the button, you’ll be presented with a text field where you’re supposed to prompt the tool to generate any image you’d like.
The ability to select the style of the image you’d like is a classic touch with different flavors such as Charcoal, In Sketch, Watercolor, Photorelistic, Watercolor, and more.
It’s also pretty fast if you ask me. Within a moment’s notice of entering my prompt and selecting the style I’d like for the image, I was presented with three variants for me to explore. I’ll dabble a bit more with the tool in the next few weeks and share my thoughts.
Have you tried out Microsoft Paint’s Cocreator tool? Share your experience with me in the comments.
