Drop the Paintbrush! AI Might be Coming to Microsoft Paint

Microsoft is reportedly testing ways to bring AI to its Paint app,  potentially giving people the ability to generate art using a text prompt.

According to a report by Windows Central’s Zac Bowden, the tech giant is toying with the idea of bringing the same technology that powers Bing’s Image Creator to Paint.

This technology allows users to generate a canvas based on text descriptions, similar to AI tools like OpenAI’s DALL-E 2 or Stability AI’s stable diffusion. 

Windows Central provided an internal mockup of what the integration might look like, showing a “magic paint” button, along with a sidebar that lets you enter a description of an image. 

It also appears to show that users can then add the generated image to their canvas to make changes, but it’s still too early to say how exactly this would work. 

As well as Paint, Mr Bowden reports that Microsft is also looking at ways to add AI to Photos, the Camera app, and snipping tools as well.

For photos, this could include a new feature that lets users identify people, objects or the background in a photo, and then cut and paste them elsewhere in the photo. 

As for the Snipping Tool and the Camera app, Microsoft may add optical character recognition (OCR) technology to both, according to Windows Central.

This could potentially allow each app to identify text in photos or screenshots, which would make it far easier to copy and paste information from these files.

Both Google and Apple’s smartphones have long had this OCR capability, and the feature has only improved with time.

Microsoft’s big AI push 

Paint hasn’t received any big updates since Paint 3D back in Windows 10. Both Photos and Paint received new layouts with the move to Windows 11, but the updates were mostly visual to match Microsoft’s simplified UI. 

If anything, these updates only show how long Microsoft has spent ignoring its default Windows applications in recent years.

It’s still not clear whether Microsoft will actually release any of these new features, but it wouldn’t be ao surprising given just how much AI tech the company has launched within the past year.

There are also rumours that Microsoft could release Windows 12 by 2024, and Bowden mentioned the next OS release will filled to the brim with AI tech as the tech giant invests big in AI. 

It has so far splashed out over $11 billion into OpenAI as it integrates the research group’s tech into a wide range of Microsoft products and services – from Office to Teams.

In February, it also released its very own AI chatbot called Bing Chat. The chatbot was initially met with criticism from users, who reported bizarre and sometimes outright scary conversations with the chatbot prior to its official launch. 

Microsoft is holding an event on 21 September 2023 to unveil new Surface hardware and talk about AI improvements in Windows. It may announce its AI Paint integration there.