This Week in AI: Microsoft Paint takes on Photoshop with even more generative AI

Microsoft Paint has been a mainstay of the computing world for nearly four decades. For most of its life, it's been a basic drawing tool. But now, Microsoft is using AI to make it do more.

Microsoft is adding generative AI features to its Copilot Plus PC version of the Paint app, including the ability to erase and fill in spaces within an image. The move means Microsoft will begin offering a free version of Adobe Photoshop's most popular AI tools, as well as mimic features from Google's Magic Eraser, among others.

The additions are the latest ways Microsoft is seeking to beef up features for its Copilot Plus PCs ahead of the holiday shopping season. Generative AI photo and painting features have been key parts of Google's photo software, and Adobe's image editing suite. By offering these features for free, rather than through Google and Adobe's preferred subscription services, Microsoft may be able to make Copilot Plus PCs that much more appealing.

Of course, Microsoft's approach doesn't exactly replicate either company's features. Rather, it expands the paint app's functionality, giving people more options before turning to advanced editing apps.

"At Microsoft AI, we are creating an AI companion for everyone," said Mustafa Suleyman, Executive Vice President and CEO of Microsoft AI in a statement this week. "This is a new era of technology that doesn’t just 'solve problems,' it’s there to support you, teach you and help you."

As part of its upgrades, Microsoft said it'll also be adding features to its Copilot AI app that can analyze text and images and allow for voice control. Meanwhile, Microsoft said it'll be beefing up its Bing search engine with a new feature that sounds similar to Google's AI Overview, called Bing Generative Search. 

OpenAI is now worth $157 billion

ChatGPT maker OpenAI has completed what Axios called the largest venture capital deal of all time, raising $6.6 billion in funding from firms including Microsoft, NVIDIA, SoftBank, Thrive Capital and others. 

"The new funding will allow us to double down on our leadership in frontier AI research, increase compute capacity, and continue building tools that help people solve hard problems," OpenAI said in a statement posted to its website.

Notably, Apple did not take part, despite earlier rumors that it was planning to. Additionally, this $6.6 billion is more than Elon Musk raised for his xAI, which is meant to compete with OpenAI (which he also helped to found and then sued).

OpenAI's voice expands

OpenAI is expanding access to its human-like voice feature, which was announced earlier this year and criticized for its similar sound to "Her" movie actress Scarlett Johansson. Now, the company will allow app developers to create AI assistants and add them to any app through its "real time API."

For example, the company said developers could create a virtual travel agent that can also research information and even make phone calls.

Semafor said OpenAI has promised to implement "safety measures and monitoring" to prevent abuse of this new feature.

AI bots now beat most CAPTCHAs

The Arnold Schwarzenegger-sounding voice in the background of the AI boom got a little louder, as a researcher found that bots can now "match human-level performance" for CAPTCHAs, according to a report from Ars Technica. Those annoying image selector thingies on websites are designed, you may remember, to help identify whether the person visiting is human or not.

Previous academic studies had reportedly indicated that bots were only able to succeed at resolving CAPTCHAs some of the time. Now that bots are increasingly getting better at mimicking tasks that were considered only passible by humans, Ars adds, "it may continue to get harder and harder to ensure that the user on the other end of that web browser is actually a person."