The first time I learned about "Loab," it sent shivers down my spine. A strange dead-eyed ghoul that began haunting an AI image generator last year, Loab reminded me of a fiend I'd been tracking for years. This may not seem like an obvious connection to make. The Marquis de Sade, one of the most infamous names in all of writing, was an 18th century French aristocrat, a man known for debauchery and evading authorities, breaking out of prison and eluding his own public execution in 1772. Loab is very much a product of the modern age, the accidental creation of artist Supercomposite, who claimed to have "discovered" her in an AI text-to-image generator in April of last year.

Are there ghosts in our machines? Well, of course not, but a recent viral Twitter thread might have you believing there is something sinister lurking behind your computer screen, just waiting to be unleashed. On Sept. 6, the internet was introduced to "Loab," an apparently AI-generated "woman." The internet promptly began calling her "the first cryptid of latent space," "creepy," a "demon" and "a queer icon." There's a lot going on here, so let's explain. By signing up, you agree to our Terms of Use and acknowledge the data practices in our Privacy Policy.

Loab was created entirely by artificial intelligence. An AI-generated character might not sound so remarkable in an era of deepfakes and all manner of digital alchemy. Generated by accident, she leaves an indelible trace on every image associated with her persona. She's often accompanied by extreme gore and violence, and it's not clear why. Not even those who understand this tech can explain what she's doing here. WARNING: The following content may be distressing for some viewers. Loab (pronounced "lobe") was first discovered in April this year by 31-year-old artist Steph Swanson, known online as Supercomposite.

This is getting way too familiar. Loab is an AI "entity" with ugly biometric images and a dystopian side built in. So is the spiel that goes with Loab. Artificial intelligence could steal humanity's mediocrity from it. All that banality wasted in a sea of self-generated realities.

Creative artificial intelligence is the latest and, in some ways, most surprising and exhilarating art form in the world. It also isn't fully formed yet. That tension is causing some confusion. If you're familiar at all with the use of creative artificial intelligence, you probably know it through one of the popular text-to-image AI applications, which use sprawling databases of existing imagery to convert a written prompt into a new picture. DALL-E 2 from OpenAI is the best known, but more recent and arguably cooler applications include Midjourney and Stable Diffusion.

Loab has been dubbed the first artificial intelligence-generated cryptid image and is taking the AI community by storm with its urban-legend mystique and horror backstory. Computers are becoming increasingly sophisticated, and powerful AI is being developed to make human lives easier, more fun or anything in between. AI simply stands for artificial intelligence, and as the name implies, it is the idea of creating a system that has similar intelligence or thinks similarly to humans. With advanced text-to-image software such as Dall-E 2 and Google's Imagen AI, the possibilities of artificial intelligence have never looked so bright, but are there darker aspects to this technology or horrible consequences for creating intelligent systems that users don't fully understand? Related:What Is The Future Of Dall-E AI Technology?

Earlier this month, Twitter user Supercomposite posted a thread of spooky images featuring a woman she calls "Loab," who usually has red cheeks and dark, hollow eyes. Since then, the images, which range from unsettling to grotesque, have gone viral. The images of Loab all come from an artificial intelligence (A.I.) art tool. These tools, like DALL-E 2, create images based on text prompts users input into the platform--and they are having a cultural moment as of late. Just last month, a piece of A.I.-created art won the Colorado State Fair art competition.

Some artificial intelligences can generate realistic images from nothing but a text prompt. These tools have been used to illustrate magazine covers and win art competitions, but they can also create some very strange results. Nightmarish images of strange creatures keep popping up, sometime known as digital cryptids, named after animals that cryptozoologists but not mainsteam scientists believe may exist somewhere. The phenomenon has garnered national headlines and caused murmuring on social media, so what's going on? One Twitter user asked an AI model called DALL-E mini, since renamed Craiyon, to generate images of the word "crungus".

Loab was created by negatively weighted prompts and her macabre appearance consistely turns up in images, even when the AI is directed away from Loab's prompts. The creepy monster was discovered by Supercomposite who is a Swedish musician. "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," writes Supercomposite.

An artificial intelligence (AI) art generator has been found to produce images of a haunting woman with sunken cheeks in gory settings in response to multiple prompts. Twitter user @supercomposite shared a series of images of the creepy figure, dubbed'Loab', which they had created using AI tools since April. 'The AI reproduced her more easily than most celebrities,' wrote Supercomposite. 'Her presence is persistent, and she haunts every image she touches'. As the artist continuously combined images of Loab with other scenes, the figure appeared to become clearer and be placed in increasingly gruesome settings.