MS Paint Stamps a Tracking ID Into Your Local AI Images
You bought a Copilot+ PC partly because the AI runs on your hardware. No cloud bills, no rate limits, no prompts leaving the machine. You open Paint, type a prompt into Cocreator, and the NPU generates the image locally. It feels offline. It is not offline. And the image you save carries something you cannot see: a 16-byte globally unique identifier, issued by a Microsoft server, embedded into…
The source material describes how Microsoft's Copilot+ PCs generate images locally using AI but embed a unique tracking ID into those images. When you create an image using the Paint app with the AI Copilot feature, the system sends your prompt to a Microsoft server for moderation. The server responds with two identifiers: a prompt generation ID and a watermark ID, which is a 16-byte globally unique identifier.
This watermark ID is then embedded into the pixels of the image itself. The process happens in three stages: the local AI model generates the image, the watermark ID is extracted from the server's response, and finally, the watermark ID is injected into the image pixels. The watermark is not an optional feature; if the process fails to embed the watermark ID, the system will fail and not save the image.
This tracking ID is separate from a visible watermark that users can turn on or off in Paint's settings. The invisible watermark is embedded regardless of whether the visible watermark is enabled or disabled. The C2PA (Content Credentials) framework is used to attach provenance information to the image file, ensuring the image's origin and AI involvement are documented.
The source material also clarifies that Microsoft collects user and device identifiers for safety and abuse monitoring, but does not store the user's prompts or generated images.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
