If you’re really bored, X’s Grok AI chatbot is now free to use

Is your weekend a bit bare-bones? Here’s something that could entertain you for a minute or two. The chatbot Grok-2 is now free for everyone to fool around with on X. We knew this was coming and, well, now it’s here. Grok it up baby.

There are some limitations for those who don’t want to plunk down $8 (or more) each month for X Premium. The free tier only allows for ten messages in each two-hour period. There’s also a hard cap on image analysis, at three requests per day. This Grok-2 beta will now be the only game in X town, as it’s replacing the pre-existing Grok-2 mini chatbot.

Look. Grok isn’t the most advanced chatbot on the planet. All LLMs make mistakes, but Grok is particularly prone to them. It says right on the chat page that users should “verify its outputs.” To that end, it caused a stir earlier this year when the wee bot was caught handing out false election information.

The image-generation component has also come under fire in recent months after it was used to create stuff like Barack Obama doing cocaine and Donald Trump pointing some guns. It has also been used to violate copyright, as it created stuff like an image of Mickey Mouse saluting Adolph Hitler.

It’s no secret that X has been hemorrhaging users as they depart for the greener pastures of Threads, Bluesky or, in rare cases, real life. Maybe Elon Musk and cohorts removed the Grok paywall to lure back dissatisfied users. However, it’s also likely that X made this move to better compete in a crowded marketplace. There are a bunch of free chatbots out there, including OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, Google Gemini and Anthropic’s Claude.

It has been reported by the Wall Street Journal that xAI, which recently raised $6 billion in a funding round, is considering a standalone Grok app. This is another thing that most big AI companies already offer.

So if you’re bored as paste, head on over to your (likely dormant) X account and give Grok a whirl. I did and it whipped up some images of cats eating spaghetti before I maxed out the query cap. Look at all of the spaghetti on that table. Bad kitties!

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