Microsoft Paint is one of those applications that, thanks to its experience and self-righteousness, has won a place in the hearts of many Windows users, and this simple but useful application has been part of Windows since its version 1.0 (although it is true that between 1985 and 1995 was called Paintbrush). Yes, in 2025 Paint will be 40 years old, for the anniversary, which of course it will share with Windows and some of its original applications, such as Notepad. A birthday that, yes, WordPad won’t be able to celebrate, which was called Write at the time, and which no longer belongs to the family.

Painting is one of those applications that everyone takes for granted, and it went without an update for a long time, to the point that at some point we started to wonder if Microsoft was considering ending it. This went from speculation to reality in 2017 when the company announced its plans in this regard. However, they had to quickly clarify what was initially implied, clarifying that their plans do not include discontinuing Paint, but making it optional to install. Optional, but with a future, something that became clear when Microsoft started telling us what new features it will have in Windows 11.

Much more recently, in the middle of last year, we learned about it the increasingly ubiquitous artificial intelligence planned to arrive in Paint as well, on the one hand with a function for intelligent removal of image backgrounds and on the other hand with the arrival, in some way, of the generative functions of the recently so fashionable LLM models. Something rather striking, since we are talking about an intentionally quite basic application. Of course, in that sense, after knowing that Copilot is coming to Notepad, we can expect anything.

After months of not hearing about it again, today we can read about it in MSPowerUser Microsoft is working on a feature called LiveCanvas that will bring generative artificial intelligence to Painting. Not much else is known about it, and the truth is that the name, which can be translated as “living canvas”, does not give us a particularly concrete idea of ​​what we can expect from this novelty when it arrives in the application.

The first thing that comes to our mind, of course, is that in Painting we are faced with the implementation of image generation functions that we already find in Copilot and that are supported, as you know, in DALL-E. However, even if it made sense, the concept of a living canvas invites us to think about something a little more advanced, and this allows not only to create new images, but also to edit existing ones, for which the background removal function is very useful. And if so, we would be talking about the greatest evolution of Painting in its entire history.