Dec. 7 (UPI) — Elon Musk’s xAI artificial intelligence firm on Saturday rolled out a free beta model of its Aurora image generator, able to producing photo-realistic footage upon request.
The Aurora service is obtainable by the Grok 2 add-on to Musk’s X social media platform, which was made free for all customers earlier this week.
“Congrats @xai for releasing a model new image gen mannequin — Aurora!” xAI developer Chris Park posted on his X account Saturday. “Grok 2 + Aurora is now out there along with your X app within the mannequin selector. Oh, by the way in which, Grok 3 is coming!”
Beneath the phrases of the free service, customers can ship as much as 10 messages to Grok each two hours and generate as much as three photographs per day, according to TechCrunch.
One AI analyst reacted by noting the roll-out was finished over a weekend.
“I do not suppose folks understand how a lot effort goes into these launches,” wrote Rowan Cheung, producer of The Rundown AI e-newsletter. “OpenAI, Google, and so forth., would not often — if ever — launch one thing huge over the weekend, given the dangers and the necessity to pull in additional folks if one thing goes flawed.
“One thing to concentrate to.”
Like earlier variations of xAI’s ultra-realistic image generator, it appeared unclear on Saturday what if any guardrails exist on what could be drawn, together with ultra-realistic depictions of public figures.
Some early customers reported having the ability to generate photographs of well-known celebrities and politicians, akin to Musk and Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni.
When first launched for premium subscribers in August, xAI claimed its image generator was designed to exclude “unlawful actions” and “deepfakes or deceptive media,” but customers had been nonetheless capable of generate extremely controversial photographs akin to former President Barack Obama taking unlawful medication or presidential candidates Donald Trump and Kamala Harris holding weapons.