Taylor Swift’s Plane Incident Prompts Companies to Rush to X
Elon Musk’s AI Grok is so outdated and boring that it is repeating controversies from a year ago. Grok-2 is the latest iteration of xAI’s large-scale language model. X users who pay a subscription can now use its bold new feature: text-to-image generation. In a move that is sure to bring advertisers back to the platform, strange and offensive images flooded X on Wednesday after the launch of Grok-2. Do you want to see , , or ? Grok can do that.
Grok will also make images of The Muppets in Vietnam, Trump dressed as a Nazi and being tried in Nuremberg, and Mickey Mouse liberating Kabul on behalf of the Taliban. Go crazy. It doesn’t matter. AI image generators typically have limits, and if asked, Grok will tell you it will not violate copyright or create inappropriate family images. But in practice, it will do whatever you want if you know how to ask.
Generating provocative images with Grok is fun for a minute. Image generation limits usually bend and break when they hit the public market, and Grok is no different. xAI will likely reset some of the limits, just like .
Here’s the problem with Grok: it feels old. We’ve all seen AI-generated images of our favorite cartoon characters doing 9/11.
Grok has always felt like a newcomer to the AI game, a large-scale language model that Musk hastily launched because he missed the OpenAI and ChatGPT trains. Musk was an early investor in OpenAI, but he left the company in 2018 due to a dispute over OpenAI’s nonprofit status. Since then, Musk has been in a public dispute with OpenAI, and suing them.
### Did Musk arrive late?
ChatGPT and OpenAI became big after Musk left. Musk launched Grok in 2023, but the market was already really captured by then. There’s not much room for a language model that does what ChatGPT does, but worse, and with extremely provocative humor.
Now Grok can make images. Great. ChatGPT, like Bing, could do that last year. Anyone who wanted an AI image generator could have been using the standalone version of Midjourney or any number of alternatives long before.
So, what does Grok’s image generator bring? A semi-viral half-second where people are using it to make inappropriate images of Taylor Swift.
So Grok doesn’t really bring anything. And its half-hearted attempt to create controversy comes at a time when Musk is throwing a legal tantrum over advertisers leaving the platform. I’m sure all these images made by Grok of Kamala Harris marrying Donald Trump will bring them back. That’s the kind of content I’m sure BMW would love to position next to an ad for their latest sedan.
