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 certain to deliver advertisers again to the platform, unusual and offensive photos flooded X on Wednesday following Grok-2’s launch. Wish to see Taylor Swift piloting a plane towards the Twin Towers, Elmo doing standup during 9/11, or Kamala Harris wielding a gun?
Certain, 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 turbines usually have guardrails and, if requested, Grok will let you know it received’t violate copyright or make non-family-friendly photos. However in observe, it’ll do no matter you need if you know the way to ask.
Right here’s a bunch of images of Musk freebasing cocaine throughout 9/11 that I made utilizing Grok.
Producing edgy photos with Grok is enjoyable for a few minute. Picture technology guardrails usually bend and shatter after they hit the general public market and Grok isn’t any completely different. xAI will in all probability get a number of the guardrails again up, similar to Bing did in 2023.
Right here’s the factor about Grok: it feels outdated. We’ve all seen AI-generated photos 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 and so they 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 status. Musk has been publicly feuding with, and suing, OpenAI ever since.
ChatGPT and OpenAI received huge 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 photos. Nice. ChatGPT, like Bing, may do this final yr. Anybody who needed a purpose-built AI picture generator may have been utilizing the standalone model of Midjourney or any variety of different options earlier than that.
So what does Grok’s picture generator deliver to the desk? A semi-viral half-second the place individuals are utilizing it to make inappropriate photos of Taylor Swift. The really devoted sickos have been working personal discord servers and discrete guardrail-free variations of picture turbines 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 certain 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 certain BMW would like to place subsequent to an advert for its newest sedan.
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