Today, Microsoft begins integrating AI art into its AI-powered Bing Chat chatbot with Bing Image Creator…and it's surprisingly good. Microsoft began previewing Image Creator last fall in select markets, and its generative AI art later became the foundation for Microsoft Designer, the excellent design application that also uses AI art to help create templates, flyers, and simple greeting cards. Today, Bing Image Creator will begin integrating with Bing Chat's textual chatbot, but also generate images at its own site, Bing.com/create . Put another way, that means that you'll be able to ask Bing's chatbot to create your own images from an integrated text prompt within Bing Chat, or else use the dedicated site. There's a third option, too: Use the new Edge Copilot sidebar within Microsoft Edge, which has been used for textual generation via AI.

Technology giant Google is using artificial intelligence (AI) to put smartphone cameras at the center of its Search platform. In a blog post today, the company said it has reached a critical milestone in understanding the Multimask Unified Model (MUM), which is an AI powered system that essentially allows people to Search for what they see in front of them. Google said it will be introducing ways to "search visually" in the coming months "with the ability to ask questions about what you see". MUM was a system Google first unveiled at the I/O conference earlier this year, and it essentially extends the Google Lens feature that the company has been promoting for some years now. With the new features, Google will allow users to tap the Lens icon on Search and ask Google to look for patterns on the Internet.