Xitter Rolls Out AI Images in the Most Xitter Way Possible
Ivan Mehta
I've long been wondering why it was taking so long for any of the social networks to integrate generative AI images as a core feature. Well, Xitter just showed us exactly why.
Elon Musk-owned xAI’s Grok AI model can now generate images on X social network. Grok access is currently limited to Premium and Premium+ users on X.
The text below the sample image prompts suggests that Grok is using FLUX.1 by Black Forest Labs to create these images.
Early images generated by users suggest that Grok’s image generation feature doesn’t have any guardrails around creating images of political figures. However, with the U.S. presidential election around the corner, the company might put some limits on features to avoid regulatory scrutiny.
I mean, you easily could have predicted this with Xitter, of course. But if Meta rolled AI image generation out to Threads, I'm guessing it would have been a bit more guarded. "A bit more" meaning, it would have had at least some guardrails. Still, users would have found a way to get around some of those, as users always do. And Meta would face a flurry of bad headlines, as Xitter now will. The difference is that Xitter seems to invite those.
The integration really is wild, even more so than Midjourney, you can seemingly create anything with Grok (with the image generation being powered by a startup named Black Forest Labs). I'm of two minds about this. On one hand, it's not clear to me that we should have limits on what people can or cannot do of their own accord. People can, say, draw a picture of whatever they want, no one is going to police that. On the other, these tools do make such antics easy to scale including for nefarious purposes. So I think there are probably ways and needs to police that. It's really about intent, in many ways. Like yelling "fire!" in a theater.
Part of that is IP infringement, of course. And there, Grok/Flux may run into some issues, even if there are no fucks given by Elon/Xitter.