For a few hours on Saturday, some users of Elon Musk's X reported having access to Aurora, a new, more photorealistic image generator powered by Musk's artificial intelligence model, Grok. While Aurora has not been widely released - and some users who reported having access to it later said their Grok had reverted to its older model, Flux - the brief glimpse at the newer model offered the first insight into how it compares to its predecessor and competitors.
Aurora's detailed generations are a notable improvement from Grok's Flux model and appear to rival the output of other models such as OpenAI's DALL·E 3. TechCrunch reported Aurora's beta version - like Flux's - appears to have few creative limitations, and in brief tests created images of copyrighted characters like Mickey Mouse and public figures, including a depiction of a 'bloodied Donald Trump,' but 'stopped short of nudes.'
While the images gained praise online for their quality and realism, there was still some evidence that they were AI-generated, such as unusual proportions in the arms and hands and an uncanny smoothness to some facial and skin features. 'X AI casually releasing one of the best image models on a Saturday at 2am... @xai y'all are built different,' Guillaume Verdon, the founder of AI startup Extropic and of the effective accelerationism movement, which supports AI growth, remarked.
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