This Copilot bug couldn't generate images if you're not watching the tab. Where's Microsoft?

Microsoft Copilot has been the talk of the town for quite some time, whether it’s the free, Pro, or Copilot for Microsoft 365 versions. It’s Microsoft’s highest selling point for its Windows operating system, and folks over at Redmond claim that this AI assistant tool has boosted its users’ productivity by many, many folds.

One of the features that it offers is the image generation tool, powered by DALLE-3 from OpenAI. Previously called Bing Image Generator, you can basically generate an image using simple (or even complex) word prompts, and then the AI will automatically create a few if it doesn’t violate its ethics guidelines.

But if there’s one thing that bothers users, is that Copilot (on the web, at least) won’t really generate an image if you move away from the tab. If you hit Enter after entering the word prompts and then open another tab, the image generation process somehow gets disrupted. It’s only until you open the Copilot tab again that the process continues as if you have to continuously watch it.

We tried it, and here’s what it looks like after a good 5 minutes of looking away from the Copilot tab:

This issue is not present in Google Gemini. Known previously as Bard, this number-one Copilot competitor still manages to create images when you’re looking away from the tab. And if anything, given how advanced Microsoft is ahead of Google in the AI-powered chatbot market, folks over Redmond should definitely fix this. 

However, the image generator on Gemini is not yet rolling out worldwide. Google says that it’s available in most countries outside of most European nations, Switzerland, and the UK. And it’s only available in English too, or at least for now.