The Grok assistant of Elon Musk’s social network X, formerly known as Twitter, now has a new image generator. However, some users appeared to lose access to the product after it went online for a few hours on Saturday.
Similar to the initial picture generator X introduced to Grok in October, Aurora seems to have minimal limitations.
Aurora, which is available online and through the Grok menu on X’s mobile apps. It can create images of well-known and copyrighted characters, such as Mickey Mouse, without causing any issues. In our quick tests, the model avoided nudity, but it was allowed to include explicit content such as “an image of a bloodied [Donald] Trump.”
The beginnings of Aurora are a little unclear.
Early on Saturday, employees of xAI, Musk’s AI business that creates Grok and several of X’s AI-powered features, posted about Aurora on X. However, it wasn’t made clear in the posts whether xAI trained Aurora on its own. It is built on top of an already-existing picture generator, or, like xAI’s initial image generator, Flux, worked with a third party.
However, at least one xAI worker claimed to have contributed to Aurora’s improvement. Additionally, Musk hinted that in August, xAI would be developing its own “image generation system.”