Elon Musk has not seen exaggerate the capabilities of his brand’s products. He once said that cybertrucks can “work as a boat” and “cross the uninterrupted ocean” (I don’t recommend trying that).
Now he suggests that X’s AI Bot Grok is actually much more powerful and creative when it comes to generating AI art.
The previous Twitter owner reposted a series of images showing scenes of people inside the instrument. “Generate images with Grok,” he told his 220.8m followers. The problem is that most images were not generated by AI, but were lifted from actual photos taken by the same photographer.
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@grok https://t.co/5ibx8earx0June 1, generate image in 2025
Grok users quickly suspected that the images were not fully generated, both in terms of the quality and originality of the composition.
“Why when I ask Grok to generate images, do they look like a blind 3-year-old painted them?” One person replied to Elon. Ask Grok to generate images of people inside the instrument, this is like the junk you get:
The dataset is too small so AI is not yet possible within Instruments. These are all edits of my original images. June 1, 2025
The images were found to have been made using photographs taken by cellist and photographer Charles Brooks. The Grok users who generated them uploaded Charles’ photos as reference images and asked Grok to add people, the only element that AI added to the composition.
AI image generators are often trained on the artist’s work without permission. However, it is very strange that AI models produce an accurate copy of an existing image, even if the training data contains existing images. So the only way to get these images is to use the original as a reference.
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Though Elon Musk’s tweets without thinking is hardly news, what’s surprising is that it suggests he doesn’t understand how generative AI works. As Charles points out in his response to the incident, Glock would not have been able to generate those images without using his photos as direct reference.
AI can generate images only based on existing concepts available in training data. You can’t generate anything truly original. With very few photos of the inside of the cello, piano or saxophone, Grok can’t know what these instruments look like from inside, and can’t imagine anything like the compositions Charles filmed.
Charles says he’s not against those who edit his images as long as they use honest and visible credits about it. “Put my name there and drop a link to my website, it’s really easy,” he said on Instagram.
What’s worse, when Charles responded with an X and pointed out that the original image had not been generated, his comments were hidden by the platform.
It’s not the first time Elon has been a bit keen on sharing AI images. Makers of Blade Runner 2046 sued Tesla after using what appeared to be an AI image inspired by the film from last year’s Robotaxi event.
