She’s out there somewhere, lurking in a parallel universe of possibilities. All you have to do to bring them to life is type the right prompt into an AI image generator.
Like a digital incantation, the words reveal the eerie face of a middle-aged woman with dead eyes, a blank stare, and a disturbing grimace.
Her name is Loab (pronounced like ‘lobe’) and she was discovered by an artist based in Sweden named ‘discovered’. supercomposite on twitter.
Supercomposite is among the first modern developers to explore the realms of text-to-image AI generators. Last year when I was experimenting with negative prompts (the asking machine learning Algorithms to find the extreme opposite of something), the artist stumbled across a creepy face.
When Supercomposite ran the prompt again, they said the same woman came back, this time alongside the word “loab.”
“The AI reproduced them more easily than most celebrities. Her presence is persistent and she haunts every image she touches,” supercomposite explained on Twitter in a September 2022 thread about Loab’s discovery.
“Have a seat. This is a true horror story and looks extremely macabre.”
With a hook like this, it’s no wonder Loab took the internet by storm. The image of this mysterious woman is now so well known that she even has her own Wikipedia page.
🧵: I discovered this woman I call Loab in April. The AI reproduced them more easily than most celebrities. Her presence is persistent and she haunts every image she touches. CW: Have a seat. This is a true horror story with an extremely macabre character. pic.twitter.com/gmUlf6mZtk
– Supercomposite (@supercomposite) September 6, 2022
Part of Loab’s mystery is what she represents. Loab’s character has become something of a modern character.tronie‘ – an art form from the Dutch Golden Age that exaggerates facial expressions – one of does not represent a person, but an idea.
Loab’s allegory is just a little bit scarier than: saytitled the subject of the better-known tronie The girl with the pearl earring. More specifically, it wasn’t created by a human artist who can tell us more about the idea he was trying to portray.
There are many features among the hundreds of Loab iterations that Supercomposite has launched dismembered or screaming children in the background. Some images generated by the AI were so grotesque that the artist decided not to share them publicly.
“I tore Loab apart and put it back together. It is an emerging island in latent space that we cannot locate with text queries.” wrote the artist on Twitter.
“Sooner or later she finds everyone. You just have to know where to look,” Supercomposite added.
Even if her red cheeks or other significant features disappear, the “loabness” of the images she helps create is undeniable. She tracks the images, persists through generations and overwhelms other parts of the prompt because the AI is so easily tuned to her face. pic.twitter.com/4M7ECWlQRE
– Supercomposite (@supercomposite) September 6, 2022
Loab hasn’t caught the world’s attention just for her nightmarish qualities. Brought out of the abyss by what supercomposite calls a “Emerging Statistical Accident”the sinister woman represents a new era of creativity that we may or may not be ready for.
Brendan Murphy, a photographer and digital media lecturer at Central Queensland University in Australia, spends much of his free time thinking about the future of AI and experimenting with image and text generators.
With technology exploding lately, he believes the art world is poised for a paradigm shift much like it was when photography first emerged in the early 19th century.
Today, when Murphy uses AI to create art, he thinks of it like landscape photography, wandering around a place looking for interesting things to capture. In this case, however, the landscape he explores is a kind of parallel universe of human art.
After all, AI generators are trained on human knowledge, culture, and art traditions, which means we could plausibly have done anything they create.
These untapped opportunities are now available to be discovered, and Murphy and Supercomposite are among the first to join the hunt.
“You see things that interest you, that you really want to amplify and really want to go in that direction,” Murphy told ScienceAlert in 2022.
“There is no reason to go down this path. And there are probably really good reasons why people have never taken this route. Because it’s probably never going to impress anyone or sell anything.”
That doesn’t mean that using AI to make art is frivolous. Instead, Murphy said AI is a tool that artists can use to advance their artistic practices. And every now and then a precious figure like Loab emerges from the abyss.
“I think what’s special about Loab is that it’s a great story. It’s not just about the technology. It’s about looking at what drives the technology. It’s about the possibilities of technology,” he explained.
“And I think that’s great. I think this is a valid work of art. Much more valid than just creating a specific AI image. There is a lot of thought, a lot of experimentation, a lot of iteration.”
Anne Ploin, a digital sociologist at the Oxford Internet Institute who studies the potential impact of machine learning on creative work, takes a similar view.
“AI models can extrapolate in unexpected ways [and] “To call attention to a totally unrecognized factor in a particular painting style,” says Ploin called last year.
“However, machine learning models are not autonomous. They will not create new artistic movements on their own.”
Murphy and say other art experts It’s doubtful that AI will wipe out human creativity, at least not entirely. After all, art only exists if humans value it, and as a species we tend to be quite biased in our ability assessments.
In the future, AI-generated artworks could prompt us to question artistic traditions and explore our emotional responses to images, Murphy said.
But we are entering a world where many writing and painting services could may become superfluousthereby eliminating the jobs of many ghostwriters, illustrators, designers and photographers.
The explosion of AI-generated art in recent months has raised concerns that algorithms are ripping off artists by reproducing their distinct styles.
The best human artists will no doubt continue to compete with AI, and Murphy suspects that it will be those creators who rely on their humanity and find the most success in the future.
A public face and identity that is tangible and real may be more important than ever for artists. “Regardless of how apps like Lensa are disrupting the way art is made, the artist’s personality remains an important context for their work,” says Murphy wrote in The Conversation.
The now famous ChatGPT is an AI-based text generator that was publicly released in November 2022. Its name stands for Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer, with an engine based on evaluating the likelihood that certain words will follow each other in a block of text, similar to a supercharged version of your phone’s text recognition feature.
As with Loab, the program’s responses can appear to have a ghostly presence that tests the limits of human knowledge and creativity. Although it doesn’t take much so that the facade falls off and its wiring becomes visible as a dice-rolling “parrot” trying to produce the right strings of words to fool us.
It is left to us to dissect and judge the wisdom contained within. When asked how AI is changing art, ChatGPT Murphy seemed to agree:
” Artificial intelligence is changing the way art is created, perceived and experienced. With the help of AI algorithms, novel art forms such as music, poetry and visual arts can be generated. These algorithms can also be used to analyze and interpret existing artworks in new and interesting ways. In addition, AI technology will be used to create interactive art installations and performances that can react and interact with viewers in real time. Overall, AI enables artists to create and explore new forms of expression, and enables audiences to experience art in new and exciting ways.”
The boundaries of artistic practice are expanding, and Loab is just the beginning.
A previous version of this article was published in December 2022.
