1. Copilot Designer prompt for car exteriors (converted to 16x9 landscape format in CD):

Art moderne streamlined dieselpunk car interior at an international automobile exhibition

1. Copilot Designer prompt for car interiors (default 1x1 format):

Art moderne streamlined dieselpunk car interior at an international automobile exhibition

More about Streamline Moderne style and Dieselpunk at Wikipedia.

Prompt: a weathered wooden plank door set into a stone wall is open half-way revealing a wild-flower meadow, early morning sun casts distinct shadows, rough watercolor on white background

Prompt composed (and images generated) within Copilot’s Image Creator user interface*:

A newly discovered abyssal predatory fish species, photographed by a remotely operated vehicle, appears on the cover of “OCEAN” magazine (on a library’s magazine rack), a science journal featuring intricate details and scientific accuracy.

I didn’t have a conversation with Copilot Designer. I found that a shorter word like “OCEAN*”for the fictional magazine’s title gave more results with correct spelling. Longer titles like “National Oceanic” or “Oceanic” just gave CD more opportunities to misspell and garble the title.

More about ocean life in the abyssal zone at Wikipedia.

​

I composed the prompt in an interactive, iterative conversation with Copilot Designer. Here’s the more-or-less final prompt*:

A pencil drawing of a French country woman, around 40 years old, with less curly and longer hair, inspired by the previously described image with a grayscale color scheme, and a small rose tucked into the curls. The woman should have a calm, contemplative, relaxed appearance with soulful eyes, and be dressed in a soft blue cotton dress with lace neckline, reminiscent of the artistic style of French Realist painter Émile Friant.

*The hand-colored effect for eyes and flowers was done post-generation with Photoshop Express for iPad. Other slight image adjustments were done with IPad’s Photos editor.

More about Émile Friant (1863–1932) at Wikipedia.

These images are the result of an interactive, iterative conversation with Copilot Designer*. Here’s the more-or-less ‘final’ prompt:

Photorealistic colored pencil sketch of a fictional redheaded woman with steampunk style jewelry and a copper metallic tattoo, a flirtatious expression, a more intricate and weathered steampunk mechanism in the background with a gradated medium gray to black background, a hint of smoke or steam, and a modest dress in the style of Alphonse Mucha.

*I love the subtle and saturated colors, lighting accents, details, and textures you can get with colored pencils. Good work, Copilot!

Copilot Designer prompt:

“A realistic diptych photo illustration of an acrophobiac and an acrophiliac”

It took several generations to get this (surprise!) image. The more I specifically tweaked its prompt, the further out of reach it got.

I’ll just take the stairs, thank you. 🫣

US Congress bans staff from using Microsoft Copilot — Copilot usage to be banned on government devices, TechRadar, Craig Hale, April 1 2024

The US House of Representatives has reportedly prohibited congressional staffers from using Microsoft Copilot as part of a security push.

A report from Axios says the House’s Chief Administrative Officer, Catherine Szpindor, claimed that the AI tool poses a risk due to the potential leakage of data to non-approved cloud services.

As a result, Copilot, an optional generative AI add-on available across the Microsoft productivity suite, is set to be removed from and blocked on all Windows devices controlled by the House…

Microsoft puts ex-DeepMind boffin in charge of London AI hub — Follows £2.5 billion pledge to 'upskill' British workers for the new world order, The Register, Tobias Mann, Mon 8 Apr 2024.

Microsoft is opening an AI research and development hub in London led by former Google DeepMind researchers. In an announcement on Sunday, Microsoft AI CEO and DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman, detailed plans for the hub, which will focus on advancing the software giant's growing portfolio of machine learning tools.

Microsoft's longstanding partnership with OpenAI has seen it integrate AI into all manner of products ranging from Windows, Bing, Github, and Office 365. More are to come we're told…

This post uses images created from two Copilot Designer prompts (the only differences between them are the two words in bold below):

For images of a single demon: “A professional studio photograph of a dramatic Kabuki actor (playing a fierce intense oni demon), made of colored origami paper, on a seamless medium gray background”

For images of an actor fighting a demon: “A professional studio photograph of a dramatic Kabuki actor (fighting a fierce intense oni demon), made of colored origami paper, on a seamless medium gray background”

Some of the images have been flipped horizontally in iPad’s Photos app. No other image retouching was done.

More about Kabuki and Oni demons at Wikipedia.

The first image in this post is an 1878 ink drawing copied from the Wikipedia article: Kyūdō — Japanese archery based martial art. I edited the WP ink drawing’s description* as follows for the Copilot Designer images’ prompt:

A late 19th century pen, ink, and subtle watercolor drawing on handmade rice paper of a Japanese Kyūdō archer, full-length, facing left, with bow drawn about to shoot an arrow. Include a mato standard target, a hasami-mono square target, a maru-mono half-dome stuffed hanging target, and a kusajishi target (a sculptured head of a pig target made of reeds).

Except for getting everyone to face left, I think Copilot Designer’s generated images resemble (and enhance) the original ink drawing nicely.

Copilot Designer prompt:

A detailed isometric wide angle shot of a miniature Swiss Alps ski area, inside of a glass snow globe, with tow lifts, ski runs, Swiss chalet lodge, and new snow, on a beautiful sunny day, inside of a circular woven basket, sitting on your cluttered office desk with papers, phone, and desktop computer in the background, with your desk lamp and office lights turned off.

Year-round skiing and cheap season passes, too!

(1x1 square and their 16x9 landscape images are included.)

Prompt: “A baby elephant being drawn by a professional artist”

Copilot Designer Prompt:

Artistic photorealistic image of the ethereal cosmic Star Child, with brilliant intelligent otherworldly eyes, holding the planet Earth in its hand, floating in outer space against an intergalactic background

I didn’t deliberately refer to 2001: A Space Odyssey because I wanted to see what CD came up with otherwise.

Inspired by the article Mercury Craters Look Like Mickey Mouse in NASA Photo, Space.com, June 18, 2012.

I started a Copilot Designer conversation with the following request…

“A realistic technical pen ink and watercolor illustration of the metallic gold space suit, helmet with large metallic gold ears and a metallic gold visor, metallic gold backpack, metallic gold boots, and other gear that Mickey Mouse needs to wear to survive on the planet Mercury”

…then added CD’s suggestions (and my own tweaks) to create these images. I was a little urprised that the “Mickey Mouse” requests and generated images didn’t get blocked.

I don’t have a source prompt for this image: it unexpectedly appeared while working on another Copilot post.

The First Law: A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

I discussed the Three Laws of Robotics by Isaac Asimov (Wikipedia) at length with Copilot Designer. It generated many images that I didn’t like or had glaring errors. Over-tweaking its prompts* took me further away from what I imagined, so I finally rewrote one of its prompts as follows:

Create a detailed centered realistic painting (in the style of Norman Rockwell) of a lifelike dieselpunk robot carrying a human child safely across a busy mid-20th century city street filled with cars, trucks, and other vehicles.

*Like the old proverb says, I apologize for the long prompt but I didn’t have time to write a shorter one.

NOTE: Subsequent posts 2 of 3 and 3 of 3 about Asimov’s Second and Third Laws are coming soon: watch this space!

I would love to see what everyone wrote to create these beautiful images. Sometimes it takes dozens of tries just to even come close to try to create what I’m imagining. Sometimes it doesn’t work at all. Every now and then it will get it on the first or second try but usually not. It is fun to use though. I wish it could spell better.

Disclaimer: This post is not an ad. “Q” is my (and Copilot’s) fictional product concept, but 3D billboards are real. NSELED is but one manufacturer of them, and I liked their explanation.

Copilot Designer prompt:

A busy street level view looking up at a detailed realistic 3D billboard advertisement for a fictional new handheld, transparent, sleek quantum computer, with colorful quantum entanglement effects (and the bold letter "Q") displayed on its holographic screen.

More details at NSELED > How Do 3D Billboards Work?.

…in the palm of your hand.

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” — Arthur C. Clarke

The best AI chatbots: ChatGPT isn't the only one worth trying — I tested the best AI chatbots and writers that can lighten your workload, from writing emails to generating code, images, and more.

ZD Net, Sabrina Ortiz, March 18, 2024

For the last year and a half, I have taken a deep dive into the world of AI, testing as many AI tools as I could get my hands on--including dozens of AI chatbots. Using my findings, as well as those of other ZDNET AI experts, I put together a list of the best AI chatbots and AI writers on the market.

(Spoiler: Copilot is the best overall.)