X LAUNCHES TOOL 🚀 by Caroline Mimbs Nyce

"This week, X launched an AI-image generator, allowing paying subscribers of Elon Musk’s social platform to make their own art. So —naturally —some users appear to have immediately made images of 

• Donald Trump flying a plane toward the World Trade Center; 
• Mickey Mouse wielding an assault rifle, and 
• Another of him enjoying a cigarette and some beer on the beach; and so on. 

"Some of the images that people have created using the tool are deeply unsettling; others are just strange, or even kind of funny. They depict wildly different scenarios and characters. 

"But somehow they all kind of look alike, bearing unmistakable hallmarks of AI art that have cropped up in recent years thanks to products such as Midjourney and DALL-E.

"Two years into the generative-AI boom, these programs’ creations seem more technically advanced —the Trump image looks better than, say, a similarly distasteful one of SpongeBob SquarePants that Microsoft’s Bing Image Creator generated last October  —but they are stuck with a distinct aesthetic. 

• The colors are bright and saturated, 
• The people are beautiful, and 
• The lighting is dramatic. Much of 
• The imagery appears blurred or airbrushed, 
• Carefully smoothed like frosting on a wedding cake. 

"At times, the visuals look exaggerated. (And yes, there are frequently errors, such as extra fingers.) A user can get around this algorithmic monotony by using more specific prompts…"