Elon Musk’s Grok AI is so dated and boring that it’s repeating controversies from a yr in the past. Grok-2 is the newest iteration of xAI’s giant language mannequin. X customers who pay for a sub can use its daring new function: text-to-image technology. And in a transfer that’s positive to deliver advertisers again to the platform, unusual and offensive pictures flooded X on Wednesday following Grok-2’s launch. Want to see Taylor Swift piloting a airplane in the direction of the Twin Towers, Elmo doing standup throughout 9/11, or Kamala Harris wielding a gun?
Sure, Grok can do this.
It’ll additionally make photos of the Muppets in Vietnam, Trump dressed as a Nazi and standing trial at Nuremberg, and Mickey Mouse liberating Kabul on behalf of the Taliban. Go wild. It doesn’t matter. AI picture mills usually have guardrails and, if requested, Grok will inform you it received’t violate copyright or make non-family-friendly pictures. But in follow, it’ll do no matter you need if you understand how to ask.
Here’s a bunch of images of Musk freebasing cocaine throughout 9/11 that I made utilizing Grok.
Generating edgy photos with Grok is enjoyable for a few minute. Image technology guardrails usually bend and shatter after they hit the general public market and Grok isn’t any completely different. xAI will most likely get among the guardrails again up, similar to Bing did in 2023.
Here’s the factor about Grok: it feels outdated. We’ve all seen AI-generated pictures of our favourite cartoon characters doing 9/11. When Microsoft added picture technology choices to Bing final yr they flooded the web. Then Microsoft tightened the guardrails they usually vanished from individuals’s social media feeds.
Grok has all the time felt like a latecomer to the AI sport, an also-ran LLM that Musk rushed to market as a result of he missed the boat on OpenAI and ChatGPT. Musk was an early investor in OpenAI however he pulled out of the corporate in 2018 over a dispute about OpenAI’s non-profit standing. Musk has been publicly feuding with, and suing, OpenAI ever since.
ChatGPT and OpenAI acquired large after Musk pulled out. Musk launched Grok in 2023, however the market was really captured by then. There isn’t a lot area for an LLM that’ll do what ChatGPT does, however worse, and coloured by extraordinarily on-line edgelord humor.
Now Grok could make pictures. Great. ChatGPT, like Bing, may do this final yr. Anyone who needed a purpose-built AI picture generator may have been utilizing the standalone model of Midjourney or any variety of different alternate options earlier than that.
So what does Grok’s picture generator deliver to the desk? A semi-viral half-second the place persons are utilizing it to make inappropriate photos of Taylor Swift. The really devoted sickos have been operating non-public discord servers and discrete guardrail-free variations of picture mills on their very own machines for a very long time now.
So Grok has nothing, actually. And its half-hearted try at controversy comes at a second when Musk is throwing a authorized tantrum over advertisers leaving the platform. I’m positive all these Grok-made photos of Kamala Harris marrying Donald Trump will deliver them again in. That’s the type of content material I’m positive BMW would like to place subsequent to an advert for its newest sedan.
