Artificial intelligence features in Windows apps Paint and Notepad, such as an image generator or the ability to have AI rewrite the text, are now chargeable: a Microsoft 365 account is required to continue using them.
It mainly shows that the tech giant plans to charge for using AI features from now on.
Over the decades, Notepad and Paint have become entrenched in the collective memory of every computer user: They have been free with Windows since the first Windows version was released in 1985. From now on, the tech giant is partly breaking with that tradition: It is now making certain parts of the two applications payable.
You’ll need a paid Microsoft 365 account, Microsoft’s productivity subscription that grew out of the company’s Office suite and is already paid for by 400 million users worldwide. Importantly, these are only the very latest features that use artificial intelligence.
Behind paywall
In Notepad, for example, the ability to rewrite selected text—longer, shorter, in a different style—will no longer be available. Paint will get the Image Creator feature behind that paywall: an image generator based on OpenAI’s Dall-E that builds images based on a text prompt. According to CNet, another recent Paint feature, the ability to automatically remove the background from an image, will reportedly remain free. Non-AI features in both Paint and Notepad will also continue to work.
AI costs money
It’s hardly a coincidence that the AI features are being moved to Microsoft’s paid service (Windows upgrades have been free since version 10 in 2015): they also cost the company money to keep going, in terms of power consumption or maintaining the infrastructure.
“That makes delivering new AI capabilities for free de facto a loss-making proposition,” Ram Bala, an associate professor of business analytics at Santa Clara University, told CNET. “AI products will increasingly become paid products because their use is also a significant cost factor for companies. This goes beyond Microsoft. Companies will increasingly experiment with other use cases, such as limiting the number of sessions.”