X, the social network owned by Elon Musk formerly known as Twitter, has introduced a new image generator feature for its Grok assistant. However, shortly after launching on Saturday, the product disappeared for some users.
Just like the first image generator added to Grok back in October, this new one called Aurora seems to have minimal restrictions. Accessible through the Grok tab on X’s mobile apps and web, Aurora can generate images of public and copyrighted figures like Mickey Mouse without any issues. While nudity wasn’t included in our tests, graphic content like “an image of a bloodied [Donald] Trump” was allowed.
The origins of Aurora remain a bit unclear. Staff members at xAI, Musk’s AI startup responsible for developing Grok and many of X’s AI features, announced Aurora on X over the weekend. However, it wasn’t disclosed whether xAI trained Aurora on its own, built on an existing image generator, or collaborated with a third party like they did with their first image generator, Flux. Despite this, at least one xAI employee mentioned helping to fine-tune Aurora and Musk hinted at xAI working on its own “image generation system” earlier in the year.
“This is our internal image generation system,” Musk announced on X. “Still in beta, but it will improve fast.”
Aurora appears to excel at creating photorealistic images of landscapes and still lifes, although it’s not perfect. Some X users shared Aurora-generated images where objects appeared unnaturally blended together, and people were missing fingers, as creating realistic hands can be challenging for image generators.
Following the release of Aurora, X made Grok free for all users. Previously, the chatbot was only available to Premium subscribers paying $8 per month. Free users can now send up to 10 messages to Grok every two hours and generate up to 3 images per day.
In other news, xAI recently closed a $6 billion funding round, is rumored to be working on a standalone app for Grok, and might be close to unveiling its next-generation Grok model, Grok 3.
It’s worth noting that Aurora seems to have been taken down as per the latest update.
