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".

A nightmarish new image shows a'zombie' head after it was infected with a deadly parasitic fungus. The photo, taken in a forest in Singapore, shows fungal stalks bursting from the long-dead fly, which is missing both of its eyes. The photographer believes an infamous parasite named Cordyceps, which takes over its victims' bodies like a horror movie zombie virus, infected the fly before it died. A nightmarish new image shows a fly's'zombie' head after it was infected with a deadly parasitic fungus. Separate species of Cordyceps prefer different hosts, but generally the fungus takes over the bodies of insects and forces them to walk to the top of plants.