Technology giant Elon Musk's company Grok has launched a new AI image generation feature, which has quickly gained widespread attention. However, surprisingly, the security measures of this feature are almost non-existent. But the truth is that the driving force behind this technological frenzy is not Musk's AI team, but the emerging innovative company Black Forest Labs.
On the same day, xAI announced a partnership with Black Forest Labs to inject powerful energy into Grok's image generator using the latter's advanced FLUX.1 model. Black Forest Labs, a start-up company in the field of AI image and video, which was established on August 1st this year, seems to share the same vision as Musk's expectation for Grok to become a "unrestrained chatbot", in contrast to heavily regulated tools like OpenAI's Dall-E or Google's Imagen. For a while, social media was filled with various absurd images generated by this new feature.
Black Forest Labs, headquartered in Germany, recently completed a $31 million seed round of financing led by Andreessen Horowitz, with a luxurious lineup of investors including Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan and former Oculus CEO Brendan Iribe. The core team of the company consists of senior researchers such as Robin Rombach, Patrick Esser, and Andreas Blattmann, who played a key role in the Stability AI project and helped develop the stable diffusion model.
According to Artificial Analysis, in the field of image generation, Black Forest Labs' FLUX.1 model has surpassed similar products from Midjourney and OpenAI in terms of quality, demonstrating strong competitiveness. The company stated that they are opening their AI image generation model through platforms such as Hugging Face and GitHub, aiming to benefit a wider range of users, and revealed that they will soon launch an innovative model for text-to-video conversion.
Nevertheless, Black Forest Labs seems to have not immediately responded to TechCrunch's inquiries about concerns regarding the potential misuse of their technology. In an official statement, the company emphasized its goal of "enhancing public trust in the security of these models", but the proliferation of AI-generated images on social media seems to contradict this, with various absurd scenes such as Pikachu holding an assault rifle, which are likely trained using copyrighted materials.
Musk chose Black Forest Labs as a partner, perhaps because of its unrestrained characteristics. He bluntly stated on Twitter that excessive security measures would make AI models unsafe, and he believed that the risk of training AI to "awaken" and learn to lie is extremely dangerous. This viewpoint is fully reflected in the practices of Black Forest Labs.
It is worth noting that Anjney Midha, a director of Black Forest Labs, showcased the differences between images generated by Google's Gemini and Grok+Flux through a series of comparison images, highlighting Gemini's diversity issues in generating images of people, further confirming the advantages of the FLUX.1 model in avoiding such problems. Google has publicly apologized and suspended related functions due to this issue in February.
However, this almost "boundless" application of technology also brings significant risks. When AI-generated deepfake pornographic images of Taylor Swift spread on the internet, X platform was heavily criticized for inadequate regulation. In addition, Grok creates false news headlines on the platform almost every week, making the proliferation of false information an undeniable problem. Last week, five secretaries of state jointly called on X platform to curb the spread of false information about Kamala Harris, and Musk himself has repeatedly used AI technology to create and share false videos about political figures, further exacerbating public concerns about the authenticity of information.
Musk seems to deliberately allow these false information to freely circulate on X platform, not only allowing users to directly publish Grok AI images without watermarks but also inadvertently opening the floodgates for the spread of false news. This series of actions undoubtedly pushed Musk and his platform to the forefront of public opinion.
