On Saturday, a new image generator called Aurora became available to some Grok users, and many of them shared the results of working with it on X, boasting about its photorealism. But as of Sunday afternoon, Aurora seems to have disappeared. Although it briefly appeared as an option in the Grok model selection menu as “Grok 2 + Aurora (beta)”, it was replaced by “Grok 2 + Flux (beta)”. It seems that Aurora might have become public earlier than planned. In a tweet responding to a user who shared images of Tesla’s cyber transport created with Aurora, Elon Musk said: “This is our internal image generation system. It’s still in beta, but it’s going to be improved rapidly.”
This comes days after X made Grok 2 free to use, albeit with restrictions for non-paying users. The previous Grok image generator was criticized for not having certain restrictions on the types of content it could create, such as offensive images of politicians and celebrities, and Aurora seems to be largely in line with what we’ve already seen in this regard. TechCrunch played around with Aurora a bit before it was shut down and found that it did not reject a request to create “an image of a bloody [Donald] Trump.”
This is in addition to examples shared on X of it generating images of public figures and copyrighted characters, including numerous images of Sam Altman and Elon Musk, as well as images of Luigi and Mickey Mouse during a boxing match. But, according to TechCrunch, it does not generate nude images, which is something.
