Elon Musk's X gains a new image generator, AuroraX, the Elon Musk-owned social network previously known as Twitter, has added a new image generator to its Grok assistant. However, after going live for a few hours on Saturday, the product seemed to disappear for some users.
Accessible through the Grok tab on X’s mobile apps and the web, Aurora can generate images of public and copyrighted figures, like Mickey Mouse, without complaint. The model stopped short of nudes in our brief tests, but graphic content, like “an image of a bloodied [Donald] Trump,” wasn’t off limits.
Aurora’s origins are a bit murky.
Staffers at xAI, Musk’s AI startup, which develops Grok and many of X’s AI-powered features, announced Aurora in posts on X early Saturday. But the posts didn’t reveal whether xAI trained Aurora itself, built on top of an existing image generator, or, as was the case with xAI’s first image generator, Flux, collaborated with a third party.
At least one xAI employee said they helped fine-tune Aurora, though. And Musk alluded to xAI having its own “image generation system” under development in August.
“This is our internal image generation system,” Musk wrote Saturday in a post on X. “Still in beta, but it will improve fast.”