What are we looking at here?
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With his incessant need to post random junk on the social network he’s owned for nearly two years, Elon Musk may have overdrawn his hand.
In a Monday morning post that included zero words or commentary, Musk posted a visibly AI-generated image of a strange-looking version of the Cybertruck on a rainy, neon-lit street at night. It looks too short, too wide, and seems to be missing its pickup bed. Further undermining the photorealism, its license plate number is unreadably jumbled.
Near the car is a sign that reads “Tesla,” though the spacing between letters is pretty far off. Underneath that sign is another that, strangely enough, reads “Me Toi,” which could be a broken French translation of “Me Too” a la the anti-workplace sexual harassment battlecry that has been levied against Musk and Tesla in recent years. Or, of course, it could just be the type of garbled AI-generated imagery that’s now rapidly filling the internet, impressing almost nobody except tech CEOs.
Dump Truck
As with most of Musk’s other meme posts, the image isn’t even his original creation.
Though it’s impossible to say who the original quote-unquote artist is, the image has been circulating for a while. In early June, for instance, a random automotive enthusiast account posted it on Instagram.
About a week later, the image was reposted by the DogeDesigner X account. At some point between then and now, Musk must have come across it and decided it was nifty.
While it’s goofy as heck that he posted it, it’s not exactly shocking for Musk to be sharing generative AI art this way.
After famously cofounding and subsequently leaving OpenAI and talking a big game about Tesla’s AI endeavors for the better part of a decade, the 53-year-old tycoon decided to begin truly investing in the burgeoning technology via xAI, yet another venture.
The infamous result is Grok, the would-be-anti-woke chatbot hosted on Musk’s X platform that will, per its creator, supposedly see its second iteration released this August.
Though he hasn’t publicly proposed any plans for an AI image generator of his own, Musk has talked down about those created by other companies for their alleged liberal biases.
After right-wingers lost their minds over Google’s Gemini image generator spitting out images of a Black George Washington, Musk cosigned a claim that the results represented a “push to lecture us on diversity” and that the trend is visible elsewhere.
“The problem is not just Google Gemini,” he posted, “it’s Google search too.”
Could a Musk-funded AI image generator be next? Only time will tell — but if it’s in the Grok style, it’s probably gonna be pretty crappy.
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