Grok, the artificial intelligence assistant built into the social media platform X, got its own image generation model over the weekend.

Dubbed “Aurora,” the new model appears to be particularly adept at generating realistic images of people and animals. The output seems almost indistinguishable from actual photographs, comparable to Recraft and Mystic.

The problem is that the new model disappeared within hours: it appeared as a drop-down menu in Grok, without fanfare or announcement, and then disappeared in a flash. Elon Musk described it as “our internal image generation system. It's still in beta, but will be improved soon.” It is not clear whether it was built from scratch or, like Mystic, built on the Flux model but significantly adapted and tweaked.

Shortly after Aurora disappeared, the Grok drop-down menu was replaced with a new one called Grok + Flux. This reverts to the pre-Aurora version and uses the Black Forest Labs Flux 1.1 Pro model to create images.

What makes Grok's image generation especially fun is the ability to learn more about you and see trends based on your X posts and web search access. There was a trend of having Grok draw you in a variety of situations, which was much more accurate than similar trends using ChatGPT or DALL-E.

Aurora appears to be able to generate perfect depictions of real people, including Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and Donald Trump. This may be one of the reasons it was removed to give developers time to play it safe.

However, even with Flux Grok, the restrictions are quite loose. It can generate images of celebrities and people, including in inappropriate situations.

It seems that Aurora was just released a little too early, or dropped as a teaser, and will probably come back better than ever. If so, it would be a prime candidate for our Best AI Image Generators list.