The Elon Musk-owned social network X previously known as Twitter, has added a new image generator to its Grok assistant last Saturday. previously, it removed it. Now, it’s bringing it back — and has officially announced it.
The image generator, called Aurora, was developed by Musk’s AI company, xAI, and trained on billions of examples from the internet. In a blog post, xAI said that Aurora “excels at photorealistic rendering” and following text instructions, and can “take inspiration from or directly edit user-provided images.”
Aurora is now available on X through Grok in some selected countries and will be available to all users within a week, xAI said. Support for editing existing images will come at a later date.
“Grok can now create high-quality images through several domains where other image generation models often struggle,” xAI wrote. “It can render precise visual details of real-world entities, text, logos, and can create realistic portraits of humans.”
When Aurora was tested, it seemed to have few restrictions, just like the first image generator X added to Grok in October. Accessible through the Grok tab on X’s mobile apps and the web, Aurora could generate pictures of public and copyrighted figures, like Mickey Mouse, without complaint.
Aurora also wasn’t faultless, however.
On Saturday, X users posted Aurora-generated images showing objects blending unnaturally together and people without fingers. (Hands are particularly hard for image generators.)