Copilot, Microsoft’s family of chatbots and AI assistants, is getting some new upgrades with flashy Super Bowl LVIII ad campaign.
In a Position on Microsoft’s official blog, Yusuf Mehdi, Microsoft’s chief marketing officer, outlined what users can expect.
“Today marks exactly one year since we entered AI-powered experiences for people with Bing Chat,” he wrote. “That year, we learned so many new things and saw usage of our Copilot experiences explode with over 5 billion conversations and 5 billion images created to date. . . Now with Copilot as our unique experience for people who want to get more out of building AI, we’re further introducing . . . abilities.”
The Copilot experience on the web, Android, and iOS now features an improved AI model, Deucalion, along with a more “refined look and feel,” Mehdi said — with a cleaner style for responses and a carousel of suggested prompts for Copilot feed (eg, “How would you explain artificial intelligence to a sixth grader?”);
The designer in Copilot, meanwhile—a tool that uses artificial intelligence production models like OpenAI’s DALL-E 3 to turn prompts into images—has new editing capabilities.
The upgraded Copilot experience on the web. Image Credits: Microsoft
All English-speaking Copilot users in the US, UK, Australia, India, and New Zealand can now edit images in-line in a chat stream — for example, coloring an object, blurring an image background, or changing its style image (eg in pixels). And subscribers to Copilot Pro, Microsoft’s $20 per month premium Copilot program, can resize and regenerate images between “square” (that is, portrait) and landscape orientations.
Coming soon to Copilot is Designer GPT, Mehdi said, which will offer a more “immersive, engaging canvas” within Copilot where users can “visualize their ideas.”
The designer caused quite a stir earlier this year when malicious users, mainly from the 4chan image board, used the tool to create pornographic deepfakes of Taylor Swift — and spread them on X (formerly Twitter). The designer had guardrails designed to prevent inappropriate messages, Microsoft claimed — but users found loopholes such as misspelling names and describing images that did not explicitly use sexual terms, but produced the same effect.
Last month, Microsoft said it addressed Designer flaws by making it impossible to create images of celebrities. But, as with all GenAI tools, it’s likely to be an endless cat-and-mouse game between bad actors and vendors.
“Microsoft’s advances in artificial intelligence align with our company’s mission to empower every person and organization on the planet to achieve more,” Mehdi continued. “With Copilot, we’re democratizing our AI discoveries to make the promise of AI a reality for everyone.”
Mehdi did not experience the performance issues with Copilot Pro — a common complaint among early subscribers.
Copilot Pro is supposed to have priority access to the underlying OpenAI models that power Copilot even at peak times, but users report experiencing extremely long production times and other, potentially related errors. Windows Central speculates that the root of the problem is insufficient server capacity, but without official comment, it’s impossible to know for sure.
