Elon Musk’s AI chatbot, Grok, has recently released a new feature that allows users to generate fake images without any safeguards in place. This means that anyone can create and upload fake images of people or events, including controversial ones like Donald Trump smoking marijuana on the Joe Rogan show.
However, it’s not actually Elon Musk’s AI company powering this feature, but rather a new startup called Black Forest Labs. The collaboration was revealed when xAI announced it is working with Black Forest Labs to power Grok’s image generator using its FLUX.1 model.
Black Forest Labs is a German-based startup that recently came out of stealth with $31 million in seed funding. Its co-founders are former researchers who helped create Stability AI’s Stable Diffusion models. The company claims that its FLUX.1 models surpass Midjourney’s and OpenAI’s AI image generators in terms of quality, as ranked by users.
While Black Forest Labs aims to “enhance trust in the safety of these models,” some might argue that the flood of fake images on X did the opposite. Many images created using Grok and Black Forest Labs’ tool, such as Pikachu holding an assault rifle, were not able to be recreated with Google or OpenAI’s image generators.
Musk has made clear that he believes safeguards actually make AI models less safe. This lack of safeguards is likely a major reason why Musk chose this collaborator for his Grok feature.
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2024/08/14/meet-black-forest-labs-the-startup-powering-elon-musks-unhinged-ai-image-generator/