#loab
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Finally got my hands on the Rue Morgue issue featuring Loab! I had no idea this print-only article existed and only found out about it from a friend. I guess for the foreseeable future Loab will be haunting us in the offline world, too.
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I'm trying to remember this (creepypasta?) that went around a while ago, this guy said that some creepy woman was haunting his AI images and would randomly show up in completely unrelated prompts and make the images really gory. Do you remember that? If so, that was fake right?
loab, which was discovered by a woman, and no, it was not fake. stuff like loab doesn't really pop up anymore for a multitude of reasons but supercomposite (a friend and colleague of mine) genuinely found a weird "island" in the vector space where every direction pointed towards loab, while also being conceptually adjacent to "extreme gore", if she was included as an image prompt. not a creepypasta but also very mundanely explained.
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Melissa Chase Halloween Costume as Loab
#art#artwork#drawing#my art#my artwork#draw#cartoon#my drawing#fan art#fanart#costume#loab#Octalian#milo murphy's law#halloween#october#halloween costumes#outfit#alien#melissa chase
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I do think that AI can make art
and it wasn't the pretty, soulless copies of other artists' styles that convinced me of this.
It was the horrific, gory, distressing and disturbing work done by an AI in response to "negative" prompts (ie creating something that is the "opposite" of a set prompt), creating the new internet cryptid "Loab"
Essentially, in generating pictures from negative prompts, the AI started providing eeriy similar and deeply disturbing photos of the same woman, who's since been nicknamed "Loab".
I don't know if she's a hoax, and if she is then the idea that AI can create art can easily be taken back.
But assuming for a moment she's real, then she's a spectre that haunts the internet, showing us the most horrific depths of what lives in AI when you ask AI what something "isn't", rather than asking it to show us what "is". And that's more true art than any single soulless amalgamation of existing works, generated by a person deluding themselves into thinking they're an artist.
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Loab
The internet has spawned no shortage of contemporary cryptids – haunting, hidden beings shrouded in folklore, from Slender Man, to Momo, to the mysterious “entities” that stalk the murky yellow corridors of the Backrooms. These are all characters or creatures that have been dreamt up in the imaginations of human beings, before taking on a life of their own online, spread via forum posts, arcane video essays, and esoteric memes. Their origins aren’t easy to trace at the best of times, but what if the human element was removed altogether?
Last week, the Sweden-based musician and artist Supercomposite claimed to have stumbled across one of these beings, while messing around with an AI image-generating software (which, for various reasons, she refuses to disclose) back in April. “Originally it was a project of exploration,” she says. What she didn’t expect to find was a recurring image of a withered older woman with long dark hair, deep-set, watery eyes, and distinguishable triangles of rosacea on her cheeks. Supercomposite named her Loab...
Loab: the horrifying cryptid haunting AI’s latent space
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Seven Cryptids Most Likely to Exist (and Seven Real Creatures Once Considered to be Cryptids)
There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy…most of them are quite nice!
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Case #115: Loab
This year, a strange entity began appearing in AI-generated art, seemingly at random. She always appears in unsettling pictures. What is Loab? Is this just a bug? Or is she perhaps the first digital cryptid?
Content Warning(s): AI Art, Uncanny Valley, Digital Space, also tagging this with a Body Horror tw due to the images.
[ Episode ] [ Tweet ] [ Transcripts and Image ID to come! ]
#red web podcast#achievement hunter#rooster teeth#trevor collins#alfredo diaz#podcast#ai art#loab#digital space cryptid#cryptid#uncanny valley#body horror#body horror tw
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I discovered this woman, who I call Loab, in April. The AI reproduced her more easily than most celebrities. Her presence is persistent, and she haunts every image she touches. CW for EXTREME GORE: Take a seat. This is a true horror story, and veers sharply macabre. AdamKranz on twitter called her "The first cryptid of the latent space".
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".
I wondered: is the opposite of that logo, in turn, going to be a picture of Marlon Brando? I typed "DIGITA PNTICS skyline logo::-1" as a prompt. I received these off-putting images, all of the same devastated-looking older woman with defined triangles of rosacea(?) on her cheeks.
My friend made this image of a "[...] hyper compressed glass tunnel surrounded by angels [...] in the style of Wes Anderson". I innocently combined this image with the original image of Loab in an image prompt, without text. For reasons we can't fully explain, nightmares ensued.
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.
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.
The angel hallway + Loab also produced art with such copious gore that probably very few people want to see them, but here are two. I don't feel comfortable posting the most disturbing ones, borderline snuff images of dismembered, screaming children.
There is something moving to me about these grotesque scenes and the desperation, panic, and sadness that they convey. Again, these are produced with other images as inputs, and no text. They are the result of "cross-breeding" images of Loab with images of other things.
The images that result from crossing Loab with other images can in turn be crossbred with other images. The AI can latch onto the idea of Loab so well that she can persist through generations of this type of crossbreeding, without using the original image. Here is Loab as Kirby.
Here is Loab as a bee, and Loab celebrating Pride month. Loab can be recognizably transposed into many genres and contexts.
Even when her red cheeks or other important features disappear, the "Loabness" of the images she has a hand in making is undeniable. She haunts the images, persists through generations, and overpowers other bits of the prompt because the AI so easily optimizes toward her face.
Combining Loab with text prompts works great, too. Her signature rosacea cheeks even turn blue when I prompt for a Na'vi version of her from Avatar 2: The Way of Water (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.
I was ripping Loab apart, and putting her back together. She is an emergent island in the latent space that we don't know how to locate with text queries. But for the AI, Loab was an equally strong point of convergence as a verbal concept. And really, it was usually stronger!
The big lesson for me here with Loab is that image prompting can essentially be used as your custom vector to query the latent space. You can produce novel styles (and characters!) that you literally discover. Negative prompt weighting can help you find emergent accidents, too.
The other lesson is that image prompts, and later raw vectors and CLIP embeddings, can be used as adversarial attacks, targeting weird stuff in the distribution. I think my process in itself constitutes art, but it also reveals the AI's weakness for malicious use in other cases.
By the way. Loab seems to be recognized extremely consistently with (twitter) buntworthy's days-old implementation of image prompts for Stable Diffusion. She's everywhere, hiding. Good luck sleeping tonight:
I'm going to continually update this blog with Loab-influenced content since I have at least a thousand images with her fingerprints on them. Check back for your daily Loab sighting. She finds everyone sooner or later. You just have to know where to look.
#cw gore#ai art#ai artwork#aiart#ai#aiartists#ai generated#art#horror art#horror#artificial intelligence#cw horror#body horror cw#cw injury#loab
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I wanted to be Marlon Brando but the costume store only had the opposite of the opposite of Marlon Brando :(
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obsessed with Loab, my new horrific wife.
also morality of AI art programs aside (because the morality of them is fucked, as we all know) this is really interesting from a tech perspective and the implications are worth considering (emphasis mine):
It’s unusual for any prompt or imagery to be so consistent — to haunt other prompts the way she does. Supercomposite speculated on why this might be.
“I guess because she [Loab] is very far away from a lot of concepts and so it’s hard to get out of her little spooky area in latent space. The cultural question, of why the data put this woman way out there at the edge of the latent space, near gory horror imagery, is another thing to think about,” she said.
[...]
To be clear, it’s not as if there is some clutch of images specifically of Loab waiting to be found — they’re definitely being created on the fly, and Supercomposite told me there’s no indication the digital cryptid is based on any particular artist or work. That’s why latent space is latent! These images emerged from a combination of strange and terrible concepts that all happen to occupy the same area in the model’s memory, much like how in the Google visualization earlier, languages were clustered based on their similarity.
From what dark corner or unconscious associations sprang Loab, fully formed and coherent? We can’t yet trace the path the model took to reach her location; a trained model’s latent space is vast and impenetrably complex.
The only way we can reach the spot again is through the magic words, spoken while we step backward through that space with our eyes closed, until we reach the witch’s hut that can’t be approached by ordinary means. Loab isn’t a ghost, but she is an anomaly, yet paradoxically she may be one of an effectively infinite number of anomalies waiting to be summoned from the farthest, unlit reaches of any AI model’s latent space.
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Where my Loab enthusiasts at?
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you know how you can feel a new obsession coming on? feeling that rn with the AI anomaly Loab. i love her! i wanna write loab fanfic!
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An interaction with one of my friends, who began teaching a college class, last year.
#artificial intelligence#ai art is not art#ai art prompts#teaching artist#thought experiment#palephx#loab#art is dead again long live art
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Do you think it's possible for someone to be bored enough to summon a child-murdering demon into their life?
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So the "Waluigi" thing you created with AI art a while back was unsettling. It made my half-asleep self wake up lol. Unfortunately for my sanity, I found something last night at like 5 am (anything before 6 am is night, fight me) that was genuine nightmare fuel. Not just the "art" itself, but also how it "haunts" ai art. She has been named "Loab" and she is probably the ruler of some nightmare dimension. If I were religious I would advise the discoverer to get exorcised or somethin just in case.
*looks up Loab*
Kill it with fire!
LOL! I'm going to post a picture and a link for anyone curious. Just be warned that everything below is pure is nightmare fuel!
You've been warned! Proceed at your own risk!
Okay... but I actually like this one!
It's dark and creepy, but in a cool way!
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