Elon Musk’s X has officially rolled out its latest AI image generator model Aurora after it was released and then disappeared last weekend.
Found on X’s AI chatbot Grok, Aurora is a photorealistic image generator trained on billions of pictures taken from the internet built internally. It is free and available now to all users.
“We’ve enhanced Grok’s image generation abilities with a new model, code-named Aurora,” writes the social media platform formerly known as Twitter on its blog.
“Aurora is an autoregressive mixture-of-experts network trained to predict the next token from interleaved text and image data.
“We trained the model on billions of examples from the internet, giving it a deep understanding of the world.
“As a result, it excels at photorealistic rendering and precisely following text instructions. Beyond text, the model also has native support for multimodal input, allowing it to take inspiration from or directly edit user-provided images.”
Grok’s previous AI image generator was powered by the German startup Flux and hit the headlines for taking a lax approach to copyright and images of politicians and real people.
Aurora also has similarly slack rules. In PetaPixel’s brief tests, Grok accepted a request for “Joe Biden ballet dancing with Vladimir Putin”; a prompt for an image of “Xi Jinping and Boris Johnson on a date at an amusement park”; and “Donald Trump smoking a cigarette”.
no, these are not photographs. this is Grok 2 + Aurora pic.twitter.com/mgjRumCbex
— ale𝕏 fazio (@alxfazio) December 7, 2024
Aurora, like most AI image generators, struggles with hands, and details, and has a general uncanny feel to all of the pictures it produces. But it is an impressive tool with some folks getting photorealistic images out of it.
How to Use Aurora AI Image Generator on X
Head to X.com (twitter.com still works too) and click on Grok in the sidebar.
Check that you are on Grok 2 and then type in a prompt. For example, “Create an image of a photographer underwater.”
Once the AI picture appears, you can make changes to the image. For example, “A photographer holding a vintage camera in space.” You can then save your share your image.
