X announces its new picture generator, Aurora, will be available to all users within a week

X, the Elon Musk-owned social network formerly known as Twitter, discreetly launched a new image generator to its Grok assistant on Saturday. It then removed it. It is now bringing it back—and openly declaring it.

Musk’s AI startup, xAI, created Aurora, a picture generator that was trained on billions of internet examples. In a blog post, xAI stated that Aurora “excels at photorealistic rendering” and following text directions, and that it can “take inspiration from or directly edit user-provided images.”

Aurora is now available on X via Grok in a limited number of countries and will be available to all users within a week, xAI announced. Support for modifying existing pictures will be added later.

“Grok can now generate high-quality images across several domains where other image generation models often struggle,” the company said. “It can render precise visual details of real-world entities, text, logos, and can create realistic portraits of humans.”

When TechCrunch examined Aurora this weekend, it appeared to have minimal limits, similar to the first image generator X, which was added to Grok last October. Aurora, which is accessible via the Grok page on X’s mobile apps and the web, might generate images of popular and copyrighted figures, such as Mickey Mouse, without complaint.

During our brief tests, the model stopped short of nakedness. However, graphic stuff was not off bounds.

Aurora was not without flaws, though. On Saturday, X users shared Aurora-generated photos of items merging strangely and persons without fingers. (Hands are notoriously difficult for image generators.)