I have a mixed attitude about A.I., especially in the realm of art, photography, or images in general. I’ve tried a few different A.I. platforms, and to be honest, just recently heard about Grok, which is a Twitter / X / Elon Musk production. What caught my attention was a reference saying that Grok images “readily reproduce images of popular figures,” which I found interesting, since other A.I. platforms tend to shy away from that.
So I decided to give it a test run, and created some Grok images of two of my favorite historical figures, at least in the realm of music and literature: Miles Davis and Jack Kerouac. I asked Grok to have Miles and Kerouac hanging out at a bar, and the above image shows the first 2 results I received. I’d say these – especially the first one – depicts an accurate facial representation of these two figures.
Grok allowed me to refresh to create two new images, and here’s the second pair. Once again, the facial representation is impressive, but here’s a perfect example of where A.I. can still fall glaringly short – it produced one image of Miles Davis with a trumpet – his true instrument – but then shows him wearing a beret and playing a saxophone, which is completely inaccurate.
At any rate, this is my first exploration of using Grok, and in using their free service, I found it allows 3 queries in a 2 hour window. These two sets of pictures used up two queries, and my third was a text question in which Grok responded with an opinion, which seemed similar to text queries I’ve done with ChatGPT. But I will definitely give Grok credit for its accurate depiction of these two historical figures, at least of their facial appearances.