Microsoft Paint and DALL-E 3 join forces

Microsoft has been ramping up its implementation of artificial intelligence tools in recent weeks. It recently included Copilot in Windows 10 and then confirmed that AI assistant Copilot will eventually run on the GPT-4 Turbo language model. Now Windows 11 users have been enabled to create artwork generated by the DALL-E 3 AI photo generator in Microsoft Paint without using any external tools.

DALL-E 3 was previously available on Bing, but is now freely available on Windows 11 or the Painter app in the United States, Australia, Canada, France, the United Kingdom, Italy, and Germany. Slovenia is not on the list for now. 

If you’re using Windows 11, you’ll soon find a new “Cocreator” button in Paint. This button opens the DALL-E 3 image generation panel, where you can enter your wishes (commands). DALL-E 3 will then create three images based on your text commands and allow you to paste any of them onto your canvas. You can also choose which artistic style you want the image to appear in.

Currently, clicking the Cocreator button puts you on a waiting list for access to the DALL-E 3 generation tool. When you are granted access, the Cocreator tool will have a yellow 'preview' indicator next to it, making it clear that the feature is not yet fully fleshed out. However, the DALL-E 3 commands still work perfectly fine and you can create images without any problems.

Each image generation costs one “credit,” and new users receive 50 free credits upon sign-up. Microsoft is currently being secretive about what will happen if a user runs out of credits. When Cocreator is available globally, we can expect users who run out of credits to either be placed in a low-priority queue or prompted to purchase more credits.