In this era where AI evolves rapidly, Elon Musk has once again surprised (or perhaps startled?) us. His AI assistant, Grok, has just rolled out a new feature that makes image generation incredibly free-form, eliciting both love and hate.
With Grok, you can easily generate some unfiltered, adult-rated "photos" of Trump and then directly post them on the X platform. Sounds crazy, right? But that's exactly what Grok's new image generation feature can do.
However, behind this eye-catching feature lies another story. It was developed by a cutting-edge company called Black Forest Labs. This company, which debuted on August 1st, has already attracted $31 million in investment from big shots including Andreessen Horowitz. It seems there's a lot of gold hidden in this "black forest."
The founders of Black Forest Labs are no small fry. They were the creators of the Stable Diffusion model at Stability AI. Now, they've brought their new creation, FLUX.1, to the table, and it's said to even surpass products from Midjourney and OpenAI in quality. This is truly a "curve-jumping" moment in the AI world!
However, this unrestrained creativity also brings some issues. For instance, the X platform is now flooded with all sorts of bizarre images, some of which may involve copyright issues. This is one of the reasons Musk chose this partner. In his view, too many safety restrictions could make AI less secure. This perspective, well, it's akin to playing with fire.
Interestingly, a board member of Black Forest Labs even showcased a comparison between their product and Google's Gemini on social media. It seems that in handling the sensitive topic of racial diversity, FLUX.1 is more "politically correct."
However, this almost unrestricted image generation feature could also land Musk in trouble. Imagine if the platform is filled with fake news and deepfakes—what kind of scenario would that be? Not long ago, Musk was embroiled in controversy for retweeting a video of Kamala Harris's voice cloned by AI.
It seems Musk is intent on letting this "information freedom" prevail on the platform. By allowing users to directly post images generated by Grok (and apparently without any watermarks), he has essentially opened Pandora's box to everyone's newsfeed.
Will this unrestrained creativity lead to a狂欢 of AI or an information disaster? We'll wait and see. But one thing is certain: in this era of rapid AI development, we all need to keep our eyes open and enhance our discernment. After all, in this "black forest," not everything that glitters is gold.