Loab: Ghost in the AI
Loab: the woman who kept appearing in one woman’s AI generated art.
Swedish musician Supercomposite claims she was haunted by a recurring image while playing around with AI art generating technology. A woman’s face with black eyes kept reappearing in her images when she asked the AI to produce the opposite of any given phrase.
Who is Loab?
Supercomposite first encountered Loab when trying to create an image that was the opposite of Marlon Brando, using the prompt “Brando::-1.”
Finding the image strange but not too alarming at first, she tried again to find the opposite of the DIGITA PNTICS skyline logo using the prompt “DIGITA PNTICS skyline logo::-1”.
She kept being returned images of a distraught looking older woman with long brown hair and clearly defined triangles of rosacea on her cheeks.
Supercomposite continued to explore with negatively weighted search terms finding Loab popping up over and over again.
Here are some of Supercomposite’s tweets describing his encounters with Loab.
I'll explain negative prompt weights, in case you don't know. With these, instead of creating an image of the text prompt, the AI tries to make the image look as different from the prompt as possible. This logo was the result of the negatively weighted prompt "Brando::-1". pic.twitter.com/c1XfkN23hu
— Supercomposite (@supercomposite) September 6, 2022
Through some kind of emergent statistical accident, something about this woman is adjacent to extremely gory and macabre imagery in the distribution of the AI's world knowledge. pic.twitter.com/BIrVPr0Qva
— Supercomposite (@supercomposite) September 6, 2022
Since Loab was discovered using negative prompt weights, her gestalt is made from a collection of traits that are equally far away from something. But her combined traits are still a cohesive concept for the AI, and almost all descendent images contain a recognizable Loab. pic.twitter.com/YEj68YRoNS
— Supercomposite (@supercomposite) September 6, 2022
I started going kind of insane at this point. I had hundreds of Loab images and was starting to combine her with 3 or 4 other images at once. Most of the horror images I post even outside of this thread are descendents of the Loab lineage. Sometimes it takes more abstract forms. pic.twitter.com/nDJvdcNKh3
— Supercomposite (@supercomposite) September 6, 2022
By the way. Loab seems to be recognized extremely consistently with @buntworthy's days-old implementation of image prompts for Stable Diffusion. She's everywhere, hiding. Good luck sleeping tonight! https://t.co/o7k97NSo0O pic.twitter.com/l3hvntIycd
— Supercomposite (@supercomposite) September 6, 2022
Have you ever encountered Loab while playing with AI imaging? let us know in the comments.
If you enjoyed reading about our new friend Loab you may also be interested in strange voices appearing on United Airlines flights or the creepy warning that appeared before a train accident in New Jersey.
