Creative GenerationConsumer FacingVerified

Reviewed and published by trentmaziarz, March 22, 2026. Discovered and drafted by our automated research pipeline.

Microsoft Designer and Bing Image Creator let anyone type a description and get a new AI-generated image back in seconds — like describing a picture to an artist who draws it instantly. Both tools are powered by OpenAI's DALL-E models and launched in late 2022, with an upgrade to DALL-E 3 in late 2023. Designer is aimed at graphic design tasks like social media posts and presentations; Image Creator is built into Bing and Edge for everyday use.

Details

Designer was announced October 12, 2022 using DALL-E 2 (a generative AI image model from OpenAI), and upgraded to DALL-E 3 in November 2023. The tool uses text-to-image generation, where the system interprets a user's written description and produces a new original image. Built-in content filters block requests for harmful imagery. Users retain commercial rights to images they generate. Microsoft added diversity prompts to help produce more varied results. As of 2025, Designer is included in Microsoft 365 subscriptions with some free functionality. Questions around training data copyright and demographic bias in outputs have been raised by critics.

Products affected

Microsoft DesignerBing Image CreatorMicrosoft EdgeMicrosoft CopilotMicrosoft 365 (Word)

Sources & Evidence

Company Disclosure

Company DisclosureVerified

Welcome to Microsoft Designer

Microsoft Support

https://support.microsoft.com/en-US/designer/welcome-to-microsoft-designer

Company DisclosureVerified

AI art improvements with DALL-E 3

Microsoft·Oct 2024

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-copilot/for-individuals/do-more-with-ai/ai-art-and-creativity/image-creator-improvements-dall-e-3?form=MA13J7

News Article

Microsoft brings DALL-E 2 to the masses with Designer and Image Creator

TechCrunch·Oct 2022

https://techcrunch.com/2022/10/12/microsoft-brings-dall-e-2-to-the-masses-with-designer-and-image-creator/

Cite this record

Trace Foundation. (2026). Microsoft: Microsoft Designer and Bing Image Creator let anyone type a description and get a new AI-generated image back in seconds — like describing a picture to an artist who draws it instantly. Both tools are powered by OpenAI's DALL-E models and launched in late 2022, with an upgrade to DALL-E 3 in late 2023. Designer is aimed at graphic design tasks like social media posts and presentations; Image Creator is built into Bing and Edge for everyday use (data as of 2026-03-22) [Data set record]. AI Trace. https://www.aitrace.org/r/practice/04f71aa0-9761-4153-bf5b-5d25f97a22dc. Accessed October 14, 2026.

Stable link: https://www.aitrace.org/r/practice/04f71aa0-9761-4153-bf5b-5d25f97a22dc
Data as of: March 22, 2026
Last verified: March 22, 2026

How to cite AI Trace

Other practices by Microsoft

OtherProject InnerEye is a Microsoft Research initiative that uses AI to analyze 3D medical scans — primarily CT scans used for cancer radiotherapy planning — and automatically highlight the areas that need treatment. Peer-reviewed research found it can complete this task up to 13 times faster than a clinician doing it manually, while staying within the range of human expert accuracy.OtherSeeing AI is a free Microsoft app for people who are blind or have low vision. It uses the phone's camera and AI to narrate the world around the user — reading text out loud, identifying products by barcode, describing scenes, and recognizing faces. It launched on iOS in 2017 and became available on Android in December 2023, supporting 18 languages.OtherWindows Recall is an AI feature for Windows 11 that continuously takes screenshots of everything on a user's screen and stores them locally, so the user can later search their own history by typing questions like "find that recipe I was looking at last week." Announced in May 2024, it faced immediate criticism from security and privacy experts and was delayed multiple times before a limited release.

Have evidence about Microsoft's AI practices? Submit a report.

Report a Sighting →