Grok’s new ‘Aurora’ image generator is back, and rolling out to everyone on X

Update, December 9, 2024, 5:45PM ET: X today formally announced its Aurora image generator. “Grok’s new capabilities are now available on the X platform in select countries and will roll out to all users within a week,” the company said in a blog post. The original story, previously headlined “X adds, then quickly removes, Grok’s new ‘Aurora’ image generator,” follows unedited below:

On Saturday, a new image generator called Aurora became available for some Grok users, many of whom shared the tool’s results on X touting their photorealism. But as of Sunday afternoon, Aurora appears to be gone. While it briefly showed up as an option in Grok’s model selection menu as “Grok 2 + Aurora (beta),” it’s since been replaced with “Grok 2 + Flux (beta).” It looks like Aurora may have gone public before it was meant to. In a tweet replying to one user who shared images of Tesla’s Cybertruck created with Aurora, Elon Musk said, “This is our internal image generation system. Still in beta, but it will improve fast.”

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It comes a few days after X made Grok 2 free to use, albeit with limitations for non-paying users. Grok’s previous image generator has been called out for lacking certain restrictions around the types of content it can produce, like offensive images of politicians and celebrities, and Aurora seems pretty much in line with what we’ve seen already in that regard. TechCrunch played around with Aurora for a bit before it was taken down and found it didn’t reject a prompt to create “an image of a bloodied [Donald] Trump.”

That’s 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 an image of Luigi and Mickey Mouse in a boxing match. But, it wouldn’t produce nudes, according to TechCrunch, so that’s something.