Grok, the artificial intelligence assistant built into social media platform X, got its own image generation model over the weekend — but in a few hours, it was gone.
Named Aurora, the new model seemed to be particularly impressive at generating realistic-looking images of people and animals. The output seems almost indistinguishable from real photos and is on par with Recraft and Mystic.
The problem is that the new model was gone within a few hours. It arrived as a drop-down menu in Grok with no fanfare or notice, then disappeared just as fast. It also came the same weekend Grok was made free for most users on X.
Elon Musk described it as "our internal image generation system. Still in beta, but it will improve fast." It isn't clear if it was built from scratch or, like Mystic, built on top of the Flux model but heavily adapted and fine-tuned.
AI images of celebs by Grok Aurora. Not only does it do celebs well, it seems to know so many different people. https://t.co/Q72nV6hZVQ pic.twitter.com/jCB60xOHahDecember 7, 2024
Soon after Aurora disappeared, it was replaced with a new drop-down menu for Grok that says Grok + Flux. This takes it back to the pre-Aurora version and uses the Black Forest Labs Flux 1.1 Pro model to create images.
What makes image generation in Grok particularly fun is its ability to know more about you and see trends based on X posts or through web search access. There was a trend of people asking Grok to draw them in different situations, and it was much more accurate than similar trends using ChatGPT and DALL-E.
Aurora seems to be able to generate perfect depictions of real people including Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and Donald Trump. This may be one reason it was removed, giving developers time to put safeguards in place.
However, even using Flux Grok is pretty laid back in terms of its restrictions. It can produce images of famous people and characters — including in inappropriate situations.
It seems that Aurora was just released a little too early, or dropped as a teaser and that it will be coming back, possibly better than it already is. If this is the case, it will be a prime candidate for our Best AI Image Generator list.
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