Microsoft Paint can now transform your scribbles into AI art

Microsoft Paint can now do the painting for you. The launch of the Microsoft Copilot+ PCs (a new Surface Pro and Surface Laptop to anyone else), includes the addition of a new AI image generation tool that will turn doodles into something less abstract.

What's most impressive is that it works in real time, adjusting the resulting AI-generated image as you sketch. The new tool could give the ancient Paint a new leaf of life.

Confusing, Microsoft Paint already had a tool called Cocreator. That was a straight AI image generator – a more stripped down version of Bing Image Creator and Microsoft Designer. Presumably realising that it didn't really involve much co-creation, Microsoft's now renamed that as Image Creator and handed the Cocreator moniker over to its new tool.

What's now called Image Creator creates an image based on a text prompt alone. The new Cocreator allows you to sketch on the touchscreen of the new Surface Pro to guide the composition of the resulting image in real time. Users can choose the style of output that they want, for example oil painting, and start to sketch. The real-time generation means that new elements added to your sketch immediately influence the AI-generated composition. 

The new Cocreator requires one of the new Copilot+ PCs because it uses their neural processing unit (NPU). The new Surface Pro and Surface Laptop are available to preorder from Microsoft and Amazon for a release date of 18 June. See below for pricing.