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 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.

In-brief New rules drafted by the European Union aimed at regulating AI could prevent developers from releasing open-source models, according to American think tank Brookings. The proposed EU AI Act, yet to be signed into law, states that open source developers have to ensure their AI software is accurate, secure, and be transparent about risk and data use in clear technical documentation. Brookings argues that if a private company were to deploy the public model or use it in a product, and it somehow gets in trouble due to some unforeseen or uncontrollable effects from the model, the company would then probably try to blame the open source developers and sue them. It might force the open source community to think twice about releasing their code, and would, unfortunately, mean the development of AI will be driven by private companies. Proprietary code is difficult to analyse and build upon, meaning innovation will be hampered.

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.

The Swedish musician and AI enthusiast known as Supercomposite used an AI to create hundreds of creepy new tarot cards -- and has been blasting them on Twitter for days, in a delightful barrage of occult-flavored machine learning. The artist is using an AI called Looking Glass, which debuted last year and was made by Twitter user ai.curio. Some cards have humanoid characters with holes for faces, some feature monstrous-looking creatures in bloody shades of red, and some are creepy simply because they seem uncannily like tarot cards at first glance. These tarot cards do not exist. I generated 500 of these and I'm not stopping.