AI Has Come for Sweet, Innocent Notepad

We’re truly living in the age of the AI-fication of everything. A software I last expected to receive AI capabilities, NotePad, just proved me wrong. This one is harder to stomach. Why couldn’t we let this ancient, 41-year-old app live a plain, simple life?

The AI feature coming to the text editor is called Rewrite, powered by Microsoft’s GPT AI model. It assists with refining your writing by rephrasing your sentences, modifying your tone, and tweaking the length of your text based on your preferences.

To enhance your text, you have to highlight the part you wish to change, and then access Rewrite by right-clicking the highlighted text and selecting the Rewrite option. The keyboard shortcut for this is Ctrl + I. You could also just click on Rewrite in the toolbar. Doing any of these will give you three options to modify your text: making its length shorter or longer, changing its tone (casual or professional, for instance), and changing the format. Once you’ve made your selections, Notepad will offer three different variations of your text; you can click on one and have your text refined accordingly.

Currently, Rewrite in Notepad is only available for Windows Insiders in the Canary and Dev channels on Windows 11. In these channels, Microsoft demos its upcoming products to a loyal community that previews them and provides feedback directly to the engineers behind them. Rewrite is available in preview mode to users in the U.S., France, UK, Canada, Italy, and Germany. With a Microsoft 365 Personal or Family subscription or a Copilot Pro subscription, users in Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia, Singapore, and Taiwan can use it.

When the feature eventually rolls out to everyone, you must be signed in with your Microsoft account and have available credits to use the GPT model. Microsoft will start everyone off with 50 complementary credits. You’ll get notified when your credits are running low. You can either wait until the start of next month to have them automatically replenished or purchase them via the Copilot Pro subscription if you need them urgently. You can read more about AI credits here. I wonder if the credit system will put users off, especially considering AI-assisted writing is free of cost on other platforms. With Apple Intelligence integrating the same feature on our Macs, this was probably Windows’ answer to that.

Recently, another innocent app, Notepad, also got some AI features. The good, ol’ Microsoft Paint received Generative Fill and Generative Erase. The former will make your written text prompts come to life by converting them into objects on your canvas, and the latter will erase unwanted objects from your work of art, much like the Pixel’s famous Magic Eraser.