Grok-2 and Grok-2 mini, the latest generative chatbots from Elon Musk’s xAI, create images with seemingly few guardrails. Early pictures of notable personalities such as Bill Gates, Donald Trump and Kamala Harris in questionable or compromising settings may not appear photorealistic to a trained eye, but they are still described in many cases to be quite realistic. Powered by the FLUX.1 AI model from Black Forest Labs, Grok-2 and Grok-2 mini are available in beta on X social for Premium and Premium+ subscribers and will be coming to xAI’s enterprise API later this month, according to the company.

Grok-2 is “a significant step forward from our previous model Grok-1.5, featuring frontier capabilities in chat, coding, and reasoning,” xAI explains in a blog post that describes Grok-2 mini as “a small but capable sibling” more suitable for on-device mobile use.

However, Grok-2 is the main attraction, “outperforming both Claude 3.5 Sonnet and GPT-4 Turbo” at the time of release, the post claims.

Ars Technica quotes one “frequent AI commentator” as calling Grok-2 “really good at creating fake photographs of real locations and people, and sending them right to [X].”

“With U.S. elections approaching and X already under scrutiny from regulators in Europe, it’s a recipe for a new fight over the risks of generative AI,” The Verge suggests of the latest iteration of xAI tech, adding that “image prompts that would be immediately blocked on other services are fine by Grok.”

The new generative social tool “produced images depicting political figures in compromising situations, copyrighted characters and scenes of violence,” Ars Technica writes. But it is not completely without boundaries.

When The Verge asked Grok to describe its image limitations, Grok-2 replied, in part: “I won’t generate images that could be used to deceive or harm others, like deepfakes intended to mislead, or images that could lead to real-world harm,” equivocating that “I avoid generating images that are pornographic, excessively violent, hateful, or that promote dangerous activities.”

“Most of the images are high quality but not quite photorealistic, and many of them are easily identified as having been computer-generated,” while some “may pass for a real photo at first glance,” reports NBC News.