Grok Imagine - Text to Image

What it is

xAI's Grok Imagine image model, text-to-image, as a node under KIE Next / Image / xAI / Grok Imagine. It's the same model family that powers image generation inside Grok on X - the one our KB's closed-model page flags as the least restrictive of the big consumer image models, and which the community has suspected for years of being Flux-derived under the hood.

Why reach for it over a local checkpoint? Mostly two reasons: it's fast and it's cheap per image, and its taste is different from your fine-tunes. For concepting - throwing eight variations at an idea before you commit to a local render - a closed API node in the graph is a perfectly sensible use of a metered credit. For anything you'd iterate on fifty times, stay local.

How it works

The node submits your prompt to KIE's create-task endpoint, polls until the task reports results, downloads them, converts the first result into a ComfyUI IMAGE tensor and archives the file under your ComfyUI output folder. All the ordinary pack plumbing - the same submit-and-wait behaviour as every model node in this collection, with timeout_seconds guarding the wait.

One detail worth knowing before you spend anything: this endpoint returns multiple images per task. Grok's image tasks are documented elsewhere in the pack as producing six images per task, and the node's companion behaviour in Image-to-Video - where you pick index 0–5 from a previous task - confirms it. Here you get the first result on the image socket and every URL in all_urls_json, which you can fan out with the pack's Download Image utility if you want all six in the graph.

The inputs

Required: prompt (up to 5000 characters, English is what it's tuned for - describe composition, lighting, mood).

Optional:

• aspect_ratio - 3:2 (default), 2:3, 1:1, 16:9, 9:16.
• enable_pro - off is speed mode, on is quality mode. That's the author's tooltip and it's the most consequential switch on the node: when your text matters or the composition is fiddly, turn it on; when you're fishing for concepts, leave it off.
• nsfw_checker - defaults to false, and the tooltip spells out what that means: with the checker off, KIE's filtering is disabled and whatever the model produces gets returned. That is not a promise of anything. Our KB's read stands: the provider's own moderation still applies somewhere upstream, Grok's filter is lighter than its peers, and "no guarantee that everything can be filtered out" is the vendor's own wording.
• timeout_seconds and callback_url - plumbing; leave the callback empty for normal ComfyUI use.

Outputs

image (IMAGE), url (primary result URL), all_urls_json (every result URL), task_id, raw_json, credits_consumed, credits_left. Wire image into SaveImage, an upscaler, or the pack's Grok Imagine - image to image node if you want to iterate on the result. Keep task_id around - the video nodes in this pack take a previous image task_id as an input, which is how you animate a still you just generated.

Install

Manager → KIE.ai Nodes Next, or the manual route:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/felipederosilva/ComfyUI-KIE-Nodes-Next
python -m pip install -r ComfyUI-KIE-Nodes-Next/requirements.txt

Requirements are requests, Pillow, numpy, PyYAML - no models to download, because the model lives on KIE's servers. Restart, then paste your KIE.ai key once under Settings → KIE.ai Nodes Next → Connection.

The pack builds its node list from KIE's docs index on launch and re-syncs about daily, occasionally reloading the frontend on the first run. If the Grok Imagine folder looks emptier than this article, force a catalog refresh rather than reinstalling.

Gotchas

• You're paying per call, and each call may return six images. Budget accordingly; KIE is a reseller between you and xAI, which usually means cheaper and easier to pay for than going direct, but it's still metered.
• enable_pro changes the model's behaviour, not a post-process. Don't expect the same composition at a different quality; expect a different composition.
• Six images, one socket. If you wanted the other five, read all_urls_json - the image output is just the first.
• No key, no runs. The error string is No KIE API key configured. It's the one-time Settings step, not your graph.
• Provider moderation still exists. Turning the checker off reduces filtering; it doesn't remove the vendor's policy or the model's own tendencies.