AI’s first cryptid emerges, Loab
Meet Loab: The Terrifying Face The Internet Has Dubbed the First AI Art Cryptid - IGN https://t.co/f9CIWADwey
- World News (@BullyMonkeys) October 6, 2022
An AI art enthusiast stumbled across a creepy, recurring image, known as Loab, being dubbed as the first AI cryptid.
AI are capable of taking prompts, in form of text or images, and use them as guiding points to generate art. The generated images are chaotically random, surrealist and creepy. Twitter user Supercomposite claims to have prompted the creation of an AI generated woman, later named Loab, who ‘haunts every image that she touches’.
Supercomposite asked the AI to create an image that was the opposite of Marlon Brando by typing in a negative prompt, which causes the program to create the polar opposite of its subject ('Brando::-1'), creating a strange logo with the letters ‘DIGITA PNTICS”. Supercomposite, fed the letters back to it as a negative prompt, wondering if it would show a picture of Marlon Brando. In return, the program returned the first images of Loab.
What’s weird is that you’d expect that after multiple iterations of combined images, the AI begins to show something new, but Loab is persistent in being the major theme of whatever new image is created, “haunting” and “infecting” all the results with it, no matter the subject. Explaining that almost all of subsequent prompts involving Loab featured her as a prominent, recognizable figure central to the disturbing imagery.
The AI was able to ‘latch onto the idea of Loab’, persisting through generations of images - even reappearing in later images after seemingly disappearing. The creepiness of Loab led to dubbing her ‘the first cryptid of the latent space' (the space between the input and output in machine learning), with even debate over whether this is a legitimate quirk of AI, or a cleverly disguised creepypasta - although Supercomposite posted chat logs that point to Loab being discussed privately as far back as April this year.
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