The controversial Recall feature was the subject of much attention yesterday when Microsoft announced Copilot+, but this new AI feature also makes Paint relevant again.
It’s called Cocreator and it’s a new AI feature that can take your quick sketch, filled with text, and turn it into a much more realistic and impressive image. The exciting thing is that it does all this in real time. It might not get it right the first time, so you’ll need to be patient and the more detail you give about what you want in the image, the better.
In the upper right corner you will see three options: Layers, Cocreator and Image Creator. The difference between Image Creator and Cocreator is that Image Creator only creates an image based on what you type. The Cocreator option uses what you draw and what you type to create your image.
There’s also a Creativity slider to improve or degrade the image quality, and a Style dropdown where you can choose from options like Charcoal, Digital Art, Oil Painting, Watercolor, Pixel Art, Anime, Photorealistic, or Ink Sketch. Our editor who attended the event noted that it was impressive in terms of how responsive the Creativity slider was and how quickly the images were rendered.
It's a feature that's perfect for Paint, a software program that's often ignored.
Some may consider Cocreator as the little brother of Microsoft Designer, but it still gets the job done. What's the downside? You need a Copilot+ PC with an NPU (neural processing unit).
While it might seem like there's no reason why your laptop's GPU or CPU couldn't be tasked with this function instead of an NPU, Microsoft seems more than happy to make this an exclusive feature of its shiny new Copilot+ PCs.
