Another week, another artificial intelligence model, but this one is a little different as it is an AI image model built by the team behind Grok, the X-based chatbot (which is now free).

Whatever you think of X, it's clear the platform is shifting from a social media site to offering additional AI features -- likely in competition with Meta's own AI suite including MetaAI and the Imagine image generator.

By tying these features to social media platforms, there's an argument that each new shift brings a whole influx of users for testing -- and additional data for training the next generation of the model.

That's likely to be the case with the new Grok Image Generation release, code-named Aurora. It appeared briefly over the weekend but now seems to have replaced Flux as the image generator inside Grok completely.

Writing on the xAI blog, the team explains "We've enhanced Grok's image generation abilities with a new model, code-named Aurora."

"Aurora is an autoregressive mixture-of-experts network trained to predict the next token from interleaved text and image data. We trained the model on billions of examples from the internet, giving it a deep understanding of the world."

This basically means it is particularly good at photorealistic images and following a prompt. It can also generate impressive text on the image and take inspiration from an image uploaded by a user.

It's perhaps unsurprising that one image generation test is the "Pepe the frog meme" who has become something of an alt-right icon, but Aurora can also edit -- turning a real cat into an anime version, for example.

At present, Grok's latest model is available on X in "select countries", but is rolling out to all users "within a week". If you see Grok + Flux in the model selection drop-down then you don't have access yet.

If you do, then this is a guide to using it. This guide assumes you have an X Premium subscription, which is required for using Aurora.