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Elon Musk’s desire to constantly post random junk on the social network he’s owned for almost two years may have drained his cash reserves.
In a post devoid of words or comment Monday morning, Musk shared a bizarre, clearly AI-generated, image of the Cybertruck on a neon-lit street on a rainy night: The car is too short, too wide, and appears to have no pickup bed, plus the license plate number is so scrambled that it’s almost unreadable, ruining any sense of photorealism.
Near the car is a sign that says “Tesla,” but the letters are spaced far apart. Below that is a sign that says, curiously, “Me Toi.” This could be a French translation of “Me Too,” the anti-sexual workplace slogan that has been hurled at Musk and Tesla in recent years. Or, of course, it could just be one of those garbled AI-generated images that now rapidly flood the internet, impressing almost no one outside of tech CEOs.
Dump truck
Like most of Musk’s other meme posts, the image is not his original work.
While it’s unclear who the so-called original creator is, the image has been circulating for a while now — for example, a random car enthusiast account posted it to Instagram back in early June.
About a week later, the image was reposted by the DogeDesigner X account, and somewhere between then and now, Musk must have come across the image and thought it was clever.
While it’s pretty weird that he posted this in the first place, it’s not all that shocking that Musk would share his generative AI art in this way.
The 53-year-old billionaire, who co-founded OpenAI before leaving the company and famously spent nearly a decade boasting about Tesla’s AI efforts, has decided to start investing in the fast-growing technology in earnest through his new venture, xAI.
The result is Grok, an anti-woke chatbot hosted on Musk’s X platform, with a second instalment planned for release this August, according to its creator.
Musk has not publicly proposed plans for his own AI image generator, but he has criticized image generators made by other companies as having a liberal bias.
After right-wing outrage over Google’s Gemini image generator spitting out an image of a black George Washington, Musk chimed in, saying the results represented a “pressure to lecture us about diversity” and that this trend is being seen elsewhere too.
“The problem isn’t just with Google Gemini,” he posted, “Google Search has issues too.”
Could a Musk-funded AI image generator be next? Only time will tell, but if it’s Grok-style, it’ll probably be pretty crude.
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