The Same Frightening Woman Keeps Appearing in AI Generated Images
A terrifying demon called Loab keeps appearing in pictures created by artificially intelligent (AI) text-to-image generators.
Loab was created by negatively weighted prompts and her macabre appearance consistently 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. CW: Take a seat. This is a true horror story and veers sharply macabre. pic.twitter.com/gmUlf6mZtk
— Supercomposite (@supercomposite) September 6, 2022
“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.
What Are Negative Weighted Prompts?
Negatively weighted prompts are when you tell an AI to make an image look as different from the text prompt as possible.
“With these [negative weights], instead of creating an image of the text prompt, the AI tries to make the image look as different from the prompt as possible,” says Supercompste on Twitter.
Initially, Supoercomposite tried to create a negative image of Marlon Brando, but instead, an image of a cake was created.
“I wondered: is the opposite of that logo, in turn, going to be a picture of Marlon Brando?” Writes the AI-image creator.
She then typed in the text that appeared on the cake with the negative weight instruction and received a set of “off-putting images.”
“All of the same devastated-looking older woman with defined triangles of rosacea on her cheeks.”
Supercompsite then used the photos of Loab as an image prompt, and to her horror, the AI kept throwing up gory, extremely disturbing images.
She “cross-bred” different images with the photos of Loab and time and time again a distinctive, and unnerving Load character would always appear.
“There is something moving to me about these grotesque scenes and the desperation, panic, and sadness that they convey,” Supercomposite adds.
“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.”
As an example, Supercomposite posted a photo of Loab as Kirby, as a bee, and as a character from Avatar.
“The concept of ‘Loabness’ became more abstract to me. I would include her in prompts that I knew would almost distort her beyond recognition,” the Swede says.
“After she disappeared from the image breeding lineage, she would sometimes reappear, later down the line, out of nowhere.”
The image creator says that the lesson from Loab is that image prompting, rather than text prompting, can be used as a custom vector “to query the latent space.
Creepy AI
As if Loab wasn’t terrifying enough, this week also saw a viral video from Scott Lighthiser who used Stable Diffusion, a video transformers, and an audio transformer to create the below creepy video.
@StableDiffusion Img2Img x #ebsynth x @koe_recast TEST#stablediffusion #AIart pic.twitter.com/aZgZZBRjWM
— Scott Lighthiser (@LighthiserScott) September 7, 2022
The video, made exclusively from AI technology and using platforms that are all free to use, underlines how fast this technology is developing as people begin to exploit it in more advanced ways.
Image credits: All images by Supercomposite.
