X has thrown open the doors to its AI playground. Grok, the so-called “non-woke” AI chatbot, is now available for everyone to use – not just the Premium subscribers who make up less than 1% of X’s user base. But there’s more to the story.

Meet Aurora, X’s new image generator, currently in beta (after mistakenly going live for a couple of hours). What makes it particularly interesting is Aurora’s apparent lack of guardrails. Though like every AI image generator, it still struggles with the apparently impossible task of drawing human hands correctly – a reminder that even Musk’s AI has its limitations. 

The mystery around Aurora’s origins adds another layer of intrigue. While Musk proudly proclaimed it as their “internal image generation system,” the details remain as clear as mud. Did xAI build it from scratch? Is it standing on the shoulders of existing AI giants? The company’s keeping those cards close to its chest.

As you can tell, this AI push is happening against the backdrop of social media’s identity crisis. Every platform seems desperate to jump on the AI bandwagon – Meta’s shoving chatbots into every corner of its apps, LinkedIn’s trying to make AI networking a thing, and now X is going all-in with Grok and Aurora. It’s like watching tech companies play AI bingo, each trying to outdo the other with their latest “revolutionary” feature.

The thing is, nobody seems to be asking the obvious question: do we actually want our social media to be less… social? 

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