Copilot, Microsoft’s household of AI-powered chatbots and assistants, is getting a number of new upgrades timed with a flashy Superbowl LVIII ad campaign.
In a post on the official Microsoft weblog, Yusuf Mehdi, Microsoft’s chief advertising and marketing officer, outlined what customers can anticipate.
“Today marks exactly one year since our entry into AI-powered experiences for people with Bing Chat,” he wrote. “In that year, we’ve learned so many new things, and seen the use of our Copilot experiences explode with over 5 billion chats and 5 billion images created to date … Now, with Copilot as our singular experience, for people looking to get more out of AI creation, we’re introducing further … capabilities.”
The Copilot expertise on the internet, Android and iOS now options an improved AI mannequin, Deucalion, together with a extra “streamlined look and feel,” Mehdi mentioned — with a cleaner type for solutions and a carousel of urged prompts to feed Copilot (e.g. “How would you explain AI to a sixth grader?”).
Designer in Copilot, in the meantime — a software that faucets GenAI fashions like OpenAI’s DALL-E 3 to show prompts into photos — has new modifying capabilities.
The upgraded Copilot expertise on the internet.
All English-speaking Copilot customers within the U.S., U.Okay., Australia, India and New Zealand can now edit photos in-line within the circulate of a chat, for instance colorizing an object, blurring a picture background or altering the type of the picture (to pixel artwork, say). And subscribers to Copilot Professional, Microsoft’s $20-per-month premium Copilot plan, can resize and regenerate photos between “square” (i.e. portrait) and panorama.
Coming quickly to Copilot is Designer GPT, Mehdi mentioned, which is able to provide a extra “immersive, dedicated canvas” inside Copilot the place customers can “visualize their ideas.”
Designer precipitated fairly a stir earlier this yr when malicious customers, principally from the picture board 4chan, used the software to create pornographic deepfakes of Taylor Swift — and unfold them throughout X (previously Twitter). Designer had guardrails designed to stop inappropriate prompts, Microsoft claimed — however customers discovered loopholes like misspelling names and describing photos that didn’t explicitly use sexual phrases however generated the identical consequence.
Final month, Microsoft mentioned that it addressed the Designer loopholes by making it not possible to generate movie star photos. However, as with all GenAI instruments, it’s prone to be a endless cat and mouse sport between dangerous actors and distributors.
“Microsoft’s advancements in AI align with our company mission to empower every person and organization on the planet to achieve more,” Mehdi continued. “With Copilot, we’re democratizing our breakthroughs in AI to help make the promise of AI real for everyone.”
Mehdi didn’t tackle the efficiency points with Copilot Professional — a common complaint among early subscribers.
Copilot Professional is supposed to come back with precedence entry to the underlying OpenAI fashions powering Copilot even throughout peak occasions, however customers report coping with exceptionally lengthy era occasions and other, potentially related bugs. Home windows Central speculates that the foundation of the issue is inadequate server capability, however missing official remark, it’s not possible to know for sure.
