The social network X, owned by Elon Musk, has added a new image generator called Aurora to its chatbot Grok. This generator was developed by xAI and trained on billions of examples from the internet. Aurora is capable of creating photorealistic images and following text instructions, and it can “draw inspiration from user-provided images or edit them directly.” Aurora can accurately reproduce visual details of real objects, text, logos, and generate realistic portraits of people.
Aurora has restrictions on generating certain types of content, but overall can create images of public and licensed figures. At the same time, Aurora faces challenges when rendering human hands and sometimes produces artifacts, where objects in the image appear unnaturally merged together.
The release of Aurora followed the opening of access to Grok for all X users. Users without a subscription can send Grok up to ten messages every two hours and generate up to three images per day. X Premium subscribers have no restrictions on using the image generator.
