Microsoft quietly added a new AI feature, called Cocreator, into its raster graphics editor included in every version of Windows since 1985. You need a Copilot + PC with an NPU that can deliver 40 TOPS or better to use it. So, you need to shell out at least $1,099 to get one of the new Snapdragon X Windows Copilot+ PCs that launched recently if you want your version of Microsoft Paint to come with Cocreator enabled.
However, Microsoft still requires you to sign in with your Microsoft account and be connected to the internet “to ensure safe use of AI.” According to Microsoft’s Privacy Statement, “Cocreator uses Azure online services to help ensure the safe and ethical use of AI. These services do content filtering to prevent the generation of harmful, offensive, or inappropriate content. Microsoft collects attributes such as device and user identifiers, along with the user prompts, to facilitate abuse prevention and monitoring. Microsoft does not store your input images or generated images.”
This is a nightmare for security and privacy-conscious users, especially as Microsoft recently blocked the last easy workaround to set up Windows 11 without a Microsoft account. Microsoft is likely doing this to stop unscrupulous users from generating illegal images like child and non-consensual deep fake pornography. However, storing this information is also a source of concern, as prompts a user typed in and stored on their account could be stolen. And, no matter how innocent, it could then be weaponized and used against them.
Or just use Krita with the AI plugin offline and local completely free, even without a GPU (if you have time to wait).
Exactly! Open source, better quality, better privacy, better editing tools, … Why am I even comparing?
Oh no. That’s unethical!
/s
It definitely is. Microsoft said that open source is bad cancer.
Was a reference to the thread next door that revealed - horror of horrors - that photos of children were part of the training data. Sure, you never know who is behind these hit pieces, but there doesn’t really need to be anyone behind it.
Bill founded the entire company on monetizing open source code from software enthusiasts across the world. If anyone knows what open source means, it‘s them.
holy shit, i just tried it, and this is amazing, thank you!
Would be cool to be AI horde compatible and just ditch the GPU requirements entirely.
I don’t think everyone got a GPU that could run stable diffusion easily, even more for laptops
You don’t have to run the AI stuff on the same computer running Krita. At home I have my gaming PC set up for that for the whole family. And if I recall correctly the plugin also promotes a specific cloud service, but you can enter any URL to a compatible service.
They were planning it long time ago but ai horde devs don’t have time for it right now.
You can see discussion regarding it and the old krita horde integration in this discord
The thing is that AI Horde relies on donated hardware. There are only so many people willing to donate relative to people who want to use.
Vast.ai lets people rent hardware, but not on a per-operation basis. That’s cheaper then buying and keeping it idle a lot of the time, reduces costs, but it’s still gonna have idle time.
I think what would be better is some kind of service that can sell compute time on a per-invocation basis. Most of the “AI generation services” do thus, but they also entail that you use their software.
So, it’s expensive to upload models to a card, and you don’t want tonnage to re-upload a model for each run. But hash the model and remember what the last thing run on the card is. If someone queues a run with the same model again, just use the existing uploaded model.
Don’t run the whole Stable Diffusion or whatever package on the cloud machine.
That makes the service agnostic to the software involved. Like, you can run whatever version of whatever LLM software you want and use whatever models. It makes the admin-side work relatively light. It makes sure that the costs get covered, but people aren’t having to pay to buy hardware that’s idle a lot of the time.
Might be that some service like that already exists, but if so, I’m not aware of it.
replied under
especially as Microsoft recently blocked the last easy workaround to set up Windows 11 without a Microsoft account. Microsoft is likely doing this to stop unscrupulous users from generating illegal images like child and non-consensual deep fake pornography.
Somehow I doubt that’s the reason.
“Yeah i just spent over a grand on a laptop just so I could use MS paint fully”
…to its full potential 💪💪
…and ethically!
Can we have AI-capable PCs without the cloud nonsense please? Isn’t the whole point of local AI to reduce cloud reliance?
We already have them. Just don’t touch any big corporation stuff and suddenly everything work without requiring the blessing of a corporate overlord. There’s already open source tools, either open or freely accessible models, and the tooling, while relatively knew, keep improving. All working locally.
Heck, even performances improves in unexpected ways. This week I ran a chatbot at an almost acceptable speed on a cheap CPU.
As long as some politician don’t come out and outlaw software as a whole (good luck with that) we’ll be fine.
It’s an accountability issue. I’m sure there’s several countries that will require accountability and filtering for illegal artwork, so this is the only way to ensure it can be done.
They could make it work entirely offline, but there would be no safeguards.
Technically, someone could write a version of the ai gen tools that work on these new NPUs, then you can have a new machine with an NPU and still use open source / self host / local only tools (Krita’s ai plugin, for example).
45 TOPS is a little less than half what an RTX 2060 can do, which is 102 TOPS, for comparison. But the power usage on these new NPUs is way lower.
I would assume not if you’re Microsoft!
I fired up Halo single-player on Steam the other day and was reminded that Microsoft doesn’t let you play unless you sign in to your Microsoft account.
its raster graphics editor included in every version of Windows since 1985
Incredibly misleading. The new version of Paint in Windows 11 is a completely different piece of software, and older versions of Windows (10 and below) will not have this function.
The day I can no longer use Windows 10 will be the day I move to Linux. I’ve already started using virtual machines for certain things so maybe performance will go up there.
This is a nightmare for security and privacy-conscious users, especially as Microsoft recently blocked the last easy workaround to set up Windows 11 without a Microsoft account. Microsoft is likely doing this to stop unscrupulous users from generating illegal images like child and non-consensual deep fake pornography.
So, just don’t include this dumbshit “feature” in your product which no one appears to actually want anyway? Seems pretty simple to me.
Yeah but if they did that they wouldn’t be able to snoop and steal content from their users.
It utterly disgusts me that Microsoft charges you for the software they use to harvest your data. At least Facebook and Google can maintain the facade that it’s an exchange of data for access to the service (it never was).
You are fired. - Bill Microsoft
So that is the reason why paint was so bad for so many years. They were actually waiting for AI to improve the strokes so no need for good editing tools
Paint is one of the best art programs available. I don’t care if other people don’t understand how to use it.
What happened to them adding layers to Paint? Did it turn into this AI version?
No no no. It does basic things and people can be good at using it, but it’s objectively bad since it lack features available in nearly all image editing softwares. Look at Paint dot net for example
I like Paint because it lacks all of that. 95% of the time, I just need cut, rotate and resize.
I use MS Paint for similar purposes all the time.
It can be launched from the run prompt (Win + R and just slam in “mspaint” and hit enter), loads instantly, and is perfect for cropping a selection out of a screenshot and then using the chunky unprofessional doodle tools to draw a bunch of circles and arrows to illustrate with maximum snideness the position of whatever paragraph or interface element is clearly right there in the user’s screen, but rather than use their eyeballs and comprehend with their brain they decided the best course of action was to bleat at me about it in a passive-aggressive email instead.
Two can play at that game. If I’m feeling particularly vindictive, I will intentionally not use the text tool but rather draw out my various “Look, dumbass, it’s right here” labels with my mouse. The more they’ve irritated me the more eye-searing colors I’ll use.
Why are you hitting Win+R and using it to crop screenshots when you could just use Win+Shift+S and take the screenshot properly to begin with? Snipping Tool also allows you to do basic doodles, and it even has the ability to move straight to Paint if you want to do anything slightly more advanced.
Because I’ve been doing it that way since Windows 95. Don’t mess with my workflow, man.
FYI Win+D sucks ass, because when you open something on your desktop it resets. Instead, if you use Win+M you will minimise all windows, then Win+Shift+M will restore them, regardless of any other windows you’ve opened.
Just as a sidenote for others, I have been using MyPaint for years now. It’s open-source, cross-platform, supports graphic tablets, no AI bs. It’s super stable, opens fast, and you can use it for maximum snideness by drawing circles and arrows
If I recall correctly it didn’t even have those in the beginning. I loved making random curves and filling the resulting shapes with some of the 16 (or 32?) colors available back then.
Our first family computer, a tremendous beast with 128KB of RAM, a 40MB HDD and a whopping 6MHz processor that you could clock up to 12MHz, there was a program that I used to do that too. I can’t remember what it was called, pretty sure it was not Paint tho (I faintly remember typing “colors” to get to it). You could draw squiggly lines with a pen tool, enter text, circles and squares, but no triangles. You could also fill shapes with color (2 switchable pallets with 16 colors each IIRC) and even “shade” the area. The shading was just diagonal, parallel lines, but you could choose which direction they go lol
I always need layers. Oops, maybe my needs aren’t universal.
95% of the time, I just need cut, rotate and resize.
Rotating in (classic) Paint is actually a huge challenge lol
Why would I spend money on computer hardware that benefits no one but Microsoft?
I wish somebody would figure out how to lock up online integrated AI with some kind of recursive nonsense or something.
