X, the social network formerly known as Twitter and now owned by Elon Musk, has recently introduced a new feature to its Grok assistant. This new addition, called Aurora, is an image generator that allows users to create realistic images with few restrictions.
Accessible through the Grok tab on X’s mobile apps and website, Aurora has the capability to generate images of public figures and copyrighted material without any issues. While the model refrains from producing explicit content like nudes, it does allow for the creation of images that some may find controversial, such as a depiction of a bloodied Donald Trump.
The origins of Aurora remain somewhat mysterious. Staff members at xAI, Musk’s AI startup responsible for developing Grok and other AI features on X, announced the release of Aurora on the platform over the weekend. However, it is unclear whether xAI trained Aurora internally, used an existing image generator as a base, or collaborated with a third party as they did with their first image generator, Flux. Nonetheless, an xAI employee mentioned that they assisted in fine-tuning Aurora.
Despite its impressive photorealistic capabilities, Aurora is not without its flaws. Users have shared images generated by Aurora that exhibit unnatural blending of objects and people missing fingers, a common challenge for image generators.
The introduction of Aurora follows X’s decision to make Grok available to all users for free, previously only accessible to Premium subscribers. Free users can now send up to 10 messages to Grok every two hours and generate up to three images per day.
In other news, xAI recently closed a $6 billion funding round, is rumored to be developing a standalone app for Grok, and may soon release its next-generation Grok model, Grok 3. The future looks bright for X and xAI as they continue to innovate and push the boundaries of AI technology.
