Updated December 9, 2024, 5:45 PM ET: X officially announced the Aurora image generator today. “Grok’s new features are currently available on the X Platform in select countries and will be rolled out to all users within a week,” the company said in a blog post. The original article, previously headlined “X Adds Grok’s New ‘Aurora’ Image Generator, Immediately Removed,” continues below unedited.
On Saturday, a new image generator called Aurora became available to some Grok users, many of whom promoted photorealism and shared the tool’s results on X. But as of Sunday afternoon, the aurora appears to have disappeared. It briefly appeared as an option in Grok’s model selection menu as “Grok 2 + Aurora (Beta)”, but has since been replaced by “Grok 2 + Flux (Beta)”. It appears that Aurora may have been released before it was intended. In a tweet responding to a user who shared an image of a Tesla Cybertruck made with Aurora, Elon Musk said: It’s still in beta, but improvements will come soon. ”
This comes days after X made Grok 2 available for free, albeit with restrictions for free users. Grok’s previous image generators have been criticized for not having specific limitations on the type of content they can generate, such as offensive images of politicians and celebrities, but Aurora is pretty much in line with what we’ve already seen in that regard. Seems to be a match. TechCrunch played around with Aurora briefly before it was removed, and found that it did not decline the prompt to create “a bloody image of (Donald) Trump.”
This is followed by an example shared on It’s in addition. But according to TechCrunch, no nudity is generated, so that’s a problem.
