Grok 2.0 takes the guardrails off AI image generation

By Andrew Tarantola Published August 14, 2024

Elon Musk’s xAI company has released two updated iterations of its Grok chatbot model, Grok-2 and Grok-2 mini. They promise improved performance over their predecessor, as well as new image-generation capabilities that will enable X (formerly Twitter) users to create AI imagery directly on the social media platform.

“We are excited to release an early preview of Grok-2, a significant step forward from our previous model, Grok-1.5, featuring frontier capabilities in chat, coding, and reasoning. At the same time, we are introducing Grok-2 mini, a small but capable sibling of Grok-2. An early version of Grok-2 has been tested on the LMSYS leaderboard under the name ‘sus-column-r,’” xAI wrote in a recent blog post. The new models are currently in beta and reserved for Premium and Premium+ subscribers, though the company plans to make them available through its Enterprise API later in the month.

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The image-generation feature appears to be powered by the Flux.1 model developed by Black Forest Labs. While virtually every other image-generation system on the market — whether that’s OpenAI’s Dall-E, StableDiffusion, or Adobe’s Firefly — has guardrails to prevent users from misusing them to generate racist, bigoted, or violent content (especially when featuring celebrities, politicians, and other public figures), Grok-2 apparently does not.

One early user declared, “grok 2.0 image generation is better than llama’s and has no dumb guardrails” while posting images of Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and xAI CEO Elon Musk boxing, as well as Donald Trump wearing a turban.

grok 2.0 image generation is better than llama’s and has no dumb guardrails.

ftw @elonmusk @grok pic.twitter.com/5wanVLrQyc

— sid (@siddaniagi) August 14, 2024

“Grok 2.0 will do political illustrations and real people, while ChatGPT refuses. This instantly makes Grok 10x more fun……” another user argued.

Grok 2.0 will do political illustrations and real people, while ChatGPT refuses.

This instantly makes Grok 10x more fun…… pic.twitter.com/yDBJO0jWba

— Benjamin De Kraker 🏴‍☠️ (@BenjaminDEKR) August 14, 2024

This new feature will surely prove a boon to internet trolls and, given the highly contentious presidential election slated for November (one of 50 national elections being held across the globe this year), it will likely aid in misinformation efforts across social media as well.

Andrew Tarantola

Former Computing Writer

Andrew Tarantola is a journalist with more than a decade reporting on emerging technologies ranging from robotics and machine…

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