X, the Elon Musk-owned social network formerly known as Twitter, has added a new image generator to its Grok Assistant. However, after the product went live for a few hours on Saturday, it appeared to disappear for some users.

So that’s new @grok The “Aurora” image generation was just delivered on a Saturday. What do we think, folks?

Looks like they were trained by them, no reviews or details, just, go ahead, use the thing.

Seems aimed at photorealism

https://t.co/oR2Uvb96vV

— Alex Volkov (Thursday/AI) (@altryne) December 7, 2024

Just like the first Image Generator X, which was added to Grok in October, this one called Aurora also appears to have few limitations.

Aurora is available via the Grok tab in the mobile apps of In our brief tests, the model fell short when it came to nude photos, but graphic content like “a picture of a (Donald) Trump covered in blood” wasn’t off limits.

Aurora’s origins are somewhat unclear.

Employees at xAI, Musk’s AI startup that develops Grok and many of X’s AI-powered features, announced Aurora in posts on X early Saturday. However, it was not clear from the posts whether xAI trained Aurora itself, built on an existing image generator, or, like xAI’s first image generator, Flux, worked with a third party.

However, at least one xAI employee said he helped fine-tune Aurora. And Musk hinted that xAI had its own “image generation system” in development in August.

“This is our internal image generation system,” Musk wrote in a post on X on Saturday. “Still in beta, but it will improve quickly.”

Check out my pictures with the new Grok @grok Image generator Aurora: 🧵

1. Ray Romano and @AdamSandler on a sitcom set pic.twitter.com/2V491RdjMF

– Matt (@EnsoMatt) December 7, 2024

In any case, Aurora seems to excel at photorealistic images, including landscapes and still lifes. But it’s not flawless. X users have posted images generated by Aurora showing objects unnaturally merging into each other and people without fingers. (Hands are notoriously hard on image generators.)

It’s a great model for certain things, but far from perfect https://t.co/AOcs92M5TF

— AI Leaks and News (@AILeaksAndNews) December 7, 2024

Aurora’s release comes after X made Grok free for all users; Previously, the chatbot was hidden behind X’s $8 per month premium subscription. Free users can send up to 10 messages to Grok every two hours and generate up to 3 images per day.

In other X and xAI news this week, xAI has closed a $6 billion funding round, is reportedly working on a standalone app for Grok, and may be close to releasing its next-generation Grok model , Grok 3, stands.

This post has been updated to note that Aurora appears to have been turned off.