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Credit: Microsoft
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Notepad gets a rewrite feature and generative fill comes to Paint
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There are quite a few AI skills on the way, including generative erasure
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One of the most impressive generative fills will only be available on Copilot+ PCs
Windows 11’s stock Paint and Notepad apps a lot of work has been done on it in the recent past, and are getting some new AI features – even if they are only being tested at the moment.
Microsoft tells us that updates for these apps will be rolled out to testers in the Canary and Dev channels (the two first testing channels).
Let’s start with Notepad, which gets a new ‘Rewrite’ ability. This works as you might imagine: you select some text and then fire up the tool that uses generative AI to do what it says on the tin, and rewrite those words.
You get a choice of three different rewrites and it’s possible to fine-tune the AI’s responses, so you can ask for something longer or in a different tone, for example.
This capability is rolling out to testers in the US, Canada, UK, France, Germany and Italy. As with most of the new features here, you’ll need to be signed in with a Microsoft account.
Notepad AI rewrite function
There’s another non-AI benefit to Notepad, which is that the app launches faster. Microsoft claims that Notepad will open more than 35% faster, with some Windows 11 users seeing a speed improvement of 55% or perhaps even more. So Notepad should be considerably more useful when it appears on your desktop.
Smart painting
Moving on to Paint, this core app gains a feature called ‘generative fill’ that can be used to easily add an AI-generated element to an image.
The example Microsoft shows is a person creating a landscape and deciding he wants a castle in the photo. So they simply select the area they want it to be in, give the AI a prompt (in this case ‘medieval castle’) and Paint goes through processing it for a few seconds before the castle appears.
It’s also beautifully and seamlessly integrated into the landscape, although as always with AI we suspect the results may be variable. If you don’t like what Paint has provided, you can ask it to try again, and the generative fill will run again to give a different view of a castle (or whatever you want).
Moving from creation to destruction, we also have ‘generative erase’ for Paint. This lets you highlight an element in an image (a person in the foreground, for example) and it will be removed, with Paint filling in the empty space that remains to match the background. Again, it’s smart stuff.
In this case, you swipe over the area to be erased, which allows for a more precise selection than with generative fill where you draw a box.
MS paint
Analysis: Copilot+ caveats
These are some pretty useful AI-powered skills with some minor caveats. The main one is that Paint’s generative fill will only be available Copilot+ PCs which initially have a Snapdragon (Arm) CPU. We’re assuming it’ll come to other (non-Arm) Copilot+ PCs soon enough – but as for whether Windows 11 users with a ‘normal’ PC will ever get it, that might not be the case ( as this may require the powerful NPU which is a requirement for a Copilot+ machine).
Mind you, all the other features are coming to non-Copilot+ devices, but there’s one more bonus for Copilot+ PC owners. This is that Co-creator in Paint – which is also exclusive to these Windows 11 devices and creates AI-generated images from scratch – has been made faster, with refinements to the “underlying diffusion-based model,” as Microsoft explains. So everything you do with Cocreator should happen faster.
The other potential pitfall, we suppose, is that this will add more fuel to the fire of dissatisfaction for some users who think so Notepad is overextended with features – those people would undoubtedly say inflated – and that this is contrary to the situation core philosophy. That said, at least the newly introduced significant performance boost for app launch will go well.
All of these features are still in early testing, as noted, so it may take some time before they hit PCs running the release version of Windows 11. Microsoft sounds like it’s being cautious with the rollout during testing as it will “monitor feedback.” and see how it lands” before pushing these updates to more Windows Insiders. Even if you’re a tester, you might not see these new features for a while.