Microsoft quietly added a new AI feature, called Cocreator, into its raster graphics editor included in every version of Windows since 1985. You need a Copilot + PC with an NPU that can deliver 40 TOPS or better to use it. So, you need to shell out at least $1,099 to get one of the new Snapdragon X Windows Copilot+ PCs that launched recently if you want your version of Microsoft Paint to come with Cocreator enabled.
However, Microsoft still requires you to sign in with your Microsoft account and be connected to the internet “to ensure safe use of AI.” According to Microsoft’s Privacy Statement, “Cocreator uses Azure online services to help ensure the safe and ethical use of AI. These services do content filtering to prevent the generation of harmful, offensive, or inappropriate content. Microsoft collects attributes such as device and user identifiers, along with the user prompts, to facilitate abuse prevention and monitoring. Microsoft does not store your input images or generated images.”
This is a nightmare for security and privacy-conscious users, especially as Microsoft recently blocked the last easy workaround to set up Windows 11 without a Microsoft account. Microsoft is likely doing this to stop unscrupulous users from generating illegal images like child and non-consensual deep fake pornography. However, storing this information is also a source of concern, as prompts a user typed in and stored on their account could be stolen. And, no matter how innocent, it could then be weaponized and used against them.
Can we have AI-capable PCs without the cloud nonsense please? Isn’t the whole point of local AI to reduce cloud reliance?
We already have them. Just don’t touch any big corporation stuff and suddenly everything work without requiring the blessing of a corporate overlord. There’s already open source tools, either open or freely accessible models, and the tooling, while relatively knew, keep improving. All working locally.
Heck, even performances improves in unexpected ways. This week I ran a chatbot at an almost acceptable speed on a cheap CPU.
As long as some politician don’t come out and outlaw software as a whole (good luck with that) we’ll be fine.
It’s an accountability issue. I’m sure there’s several countries that will require accountability and filtering for illegal artwork, so this is the only way to ensure it can be done.
They could make it work entirely offline, but there would be no safeguards.
Technically, someone could write a version of the ai gen tools that work on these new NPUs, then you can have a new machine with an NPU and still use open source / self host / local only tools (Krita’s ai plugin, for example).
45 TOPS is a little less than half what an RTX 2060 can do, which is 102 TOPS, for comparison. But the power usage on these new NPUs is way lower.
I would assume not if you’re Microsoft!
I fired up Halo single-player on Steam the other day and was reminded that Microsoft doesn’t let you play unless you sign in to your Microsoft account.