Microsoft’s Copilot AI is stealing one of Midjourney’s best features

It’s been a year or two since Midjourney absolutely overturned what we thought of conventional AI art. And now Microsoft Copilot is taking one of its ideas and making it its own.

Microsoft said Wednesday that it’s adding a rewrite feature to its Copilot prompts. You’ll also be able to write shareable prompts that you can provide other members of your team, and a new Catch Up feature will recommend next steps to jumpstart your day.

Copilot’s rewrite feature could be a powerful addition. Most people don’t actually know how to write a good prompt. Brevity is not the answer; in fact, it can be the antithesis of getting things done, because it allows an LLM or AI chatbot some leeway in what it does. That’s not always what you want.

Midjourney, a pioneer in AI art, recognized this early on. You could ask it to “draw a bee circling a flower.” Instead of taking the command literally, Midjourney silently added related words to your own prompt, like “epic, narrow focus, spring meadow, golden hour” or something like that. The result tended to add drama, providing a greater degree of satisfaction to the final result. The idea was smart enough to be copied by other AI art generators, including my favorite local AI art tool, Fooocus.

Microsoft

Microsoft

Microsoft

Copilot apparently will do the same thing, though it’s not clear how far it will go. The problem with LLMs is that a good prompt can include several components, as this excellent TrustInsights.ai paper points out: It defines a role for the LLM (sales expert), tells it the goal (plan a sales strategy for a product), gives it context, and then tells the LLM what to do and how to do it. That can take many, many sentences, especially as more LLMs accept longer prompt lengths that can go on for pages.

“With its new rewrite feature, Copilot turns a basic prompt into a rich one with the click of a button, turning everyone into a prompt engineer,” Microsoft said in a blog post. Microsoft will also steal a page from Bing, too, adding an autocomplete function for prompts.

Once you have a prompt that produces good results, you’ll be able to share it with your team in the Copilot Lab, Microsoft added.

Catch Up, the final new feature Microsoft announced, is designed to produce “responsive recommendations,” Microsoft said. It’s not clear how that will work, exactly, but Microsoft provided an example: “You have a meeting with the sales VP on Thursday. Let’s get you prepared — click here to get detailed notes.”

Presumably, those recommendations will be based upon whatever information Copilot knows about you, your contacts, your to-dos, and more.

Microsoft

Microsoft

Microsoft

All of these features will arrive in the “coming months,” Microsoft said.

Additional reporting by Sharon Machlis, director of editorial analytics at Foundry.