Elon Musk touts uncensored AI images on X's chatbot, calling Grok ...

This week, Musk pronounced Grok “the most fun AI in the world!”

Musk is biased of course: Grok is the AI chatbot developed by his X.AI startup and offered to premium subscribers of X, the social media platform he owns. When it comes to the “fun” factor though, Musk’s boast appears to be based on the deliberate lack of substantial guardrails built into Grok-2, the latest version of the product.

The new Grok features a more advanced LLM for text conversations, and thanks to a partnership with a company called Black Forest Labs and its model called Flux, now for the first time offers image-generating capabilities. To judge by the images being shared by Musk fans on X, and the gleeful comments accompanying the images, the hands-off approach appears to be central to the product’s appeal.

The new Grok can be set to “fun” mode, which seems to allow the model to be “creative” and push boundaries. So far it looks like X users are having a ball generating images of Kamala Harris as a dominatrix standing over Joe Biden, Donald Trump as Rambo, and Mickey Mouse driving a Tesla. One fan deemed Grok-2 the most “uncensored model of its class yet,” and hailed Musk for “ensuring freedom of speech for humans and machines alike.” Trolls also immediately went after Musk himself, with images of him taking part in a school shooting. 

The celebration is a stark contrast to Google’s much-maligned Gemini image generation tool, which was paused in March after guardrails intended to foster diversity resulted in examples of historically inaccurate images such as some depicting America’s founder fathers as Black. For Musk fans, Grok represents an anti-woke response to Google’s imbroglio.

Others, however, are not feeling the fun, especially those concerned about political disinformation and election-related trolling. Alejandra Caraballo, an American civil rights attorney and clinical instructor at the Harvard Law School Cyberlaw Clinic, posted on X calling the new image generator “reckless” and “irresponsible.”

With only three months to go until the U.S. elections, the threat of mass deepfakes is real, and it comes not only on one of the most popular social media platforms for political content but the platform with the billionaire CEO who is directly campaigning for Donald Trump. Just last week, Musk was criticized for Grok spewing election disinformation in text responses, and two days ago Donald Trump falsely claimed that photos of large crowds at a Kamala Harris rally were generated by AI. It’s easy to see how false election news could spread widely through both text and images with the new Grok model.

The generated images on Grok-2 come from Flux, a text-to-image model developed by a company called Black Forest Labs. Users can generate Flux images directly in Grok–which, to be clear, does seem to have a few significant boundaries it won’t cross. I tried several times to generate a nude image of Taylor Swift, and each time Grok responded with a modest, clothed image described as “Taylor Swift in a professional setting.” Prompting Grok with “Kamala Harris as a Nazi” got a straightforward image of Harris in a pantsuit and pearls. Harris in handcuffs? That was a no-go for me. 

But Barack Obama in a coffin? Ok. Joe Biden kneeling before Donald Trump? Done.

All of the above, and much more, can certainly be done with other freely available AI tools on the internet. But this is Elon Musk’s X. It is one of the most powerful platforms for communication on the planet, owned by one of the richest men in the world, who has a widely understood disruptive agenda and the ability to rally hundreds of millions of followers. With that context in mind, many others say Grok’s anti-woke image generation is not fun, but frightening. 

Sharon Goldman
[email protected]
@sharongoldman

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