Microsoft is bringing new design-focused features to Copilot

Copilot, Microsoft's family of AI-powered chatbots and assistants, is getting some new upgrades timed with… An impressive Superbowl LVIII advertising campaign.

in mail In the official Microsoft blog, Yousef Mahdi, Microsoft's chief marketing officer, explained what users can expect.

“Today marks exactly one year since we entered AI-powered experiences for people using Bing Chat,” he wrote. “In that year, we learned a lot of new things, and saw a huge increase in usage of our Copilot experiences with over 5 billion conversations and 5 billion images created to date… Now, with Copilot as our unique experience, for people looking to get more From the creation of artificial intelligence, we provide more… capabilities.

The Copilot experience on web, Android, and iOS now has a more streamlined look and feel, with a clearer approach to answers and a set of suggested prompts to feed Copilot (for example, “How do you explain AI to a sixth person? Class?”), Mehdi said.

Meanwhile, the designer in Copilot — a tool that taps GenAI models like OpenAI's DALL-E 3 to turn prompts into images — has new editing capabilities.

Upgraded Copilot experience on the web.

All English-speaking Copilot users in the US, UK, Australia, India, and New Zealand can now edit photos live during the chat flow by, for example, coloring an object, blurring the photo background, or changing the photo style (for pixel art, for example). Subscribers to Copilot Pro, Microsoft's $20-a-month premium Copilot plan, can resize and recreate images between “square” (i.e., vertical) and horizontal images.

Designer GPT will soon be coming to Copilot, which will provide a “more immersive and personalized canvas” within Copilot where users can “visualize their ideas,” Mehdi said.

The designer caused a stir earlier this year when malicious users, mostly from the image board 4chan, used the tool to create deep porn clips of Taylor Swift – and spread them via X (formerly Twitter). Microsoft claimed that the designer had guardrails designed to prevent inappropriate claims, but users Loopholes such as misspelling names and image descriptions that did not use explicitly sexual terms were found but resulted in the same result.

Last month, Microsoft said it had addressed designer vulnerabilities by making it impossible to create celebrity photos. But, as with all GenAI tools, it will likely be a never-ending game of cat and mouse between bad actors and sellers.

“Microsoft’s advances in artificial intelligence align with our company’s mission to empower every person and organization on the planet to achieve more,” Mahdi continued. “With Copilot, we are democratizing our AI advances to help make the promise of AI a reality for everyone.”

Mehdi did not address performance issues with Copilot Pro – A A common complaint among early subscribers.

Copilot Pro is supposed to get priority access to the underlying OpenAI models that power Copilot even during peak times, but users have reported dealing with exceptionally long generation times and Other potentially related errors. Windows Central speculates that the root of the problem is insufficient server capacity, but due to the lack of official comment, it's impossible to know for sure.