Meet Loab, an imagined woman painted by an AI that has been haunting people all over the internet with her gaunt features and consistently ghoulish scenarios. AI generated art is a little creepy anyway, but to find the same face staring back at you in increasingly nasty settings is, frankly, horrifying.
Whether it's Slenderman or Vigo the Carpathian, digital art and paintings have been giving us the creeps for decades. It really wasn't going to take long for art generated by an AI to join the party, after all an AI recently won a fine art competition, and Loab really is unsettling.
She's the 'creation' of Twitter poster, musician and AI art fiddler Supercomposite who accidently stumbled onto Loab when they were messing about in an unnamed AI art generator. First, the negative prompt "Brando::-1" was used with the idea of creating art the opposite of Marlon Brando; this resulted in a logo with the letters "DIGITA PNTICS", so a further prompt was tried using these letters, and we get Loab, the deathly lady, the eerie ghost in the machine, a digital demon.
Loab has rosy cheeks and lank, straight hair and is always painted by AI in gruesome scenarios (Image credit: Supercomposite)
On the surface this isn't too weird, but every time Supercomposite commanded the AI to create a painting with Loab they got back more and more macabre results; Loab surrounded in bloody body parts, severed heads and creepy bleeding dolls. All in all, it really is freaking people out. Take a look at the full Twitter conversation below.
🧵: 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/gmUlf6mZtkSeptember 6, 2022
Art generated by AI is often weird and creepy, as it's the distillation of an algorithm smudging together random but associated images into one scenario, commanded by a particular style or wording. We've already gathered some of the weirdest AI art from DALL-E 2 for you to see, but as more people experiment we're bound to witness stranger things.
What Loab tells us is how we love to see stories and read into images and art things that aren't there. I mentioned Slenderman in my intro, this was arguably the first online meme mythos.
Created by Eric Knudsen in 2009 using early Photoshop manipulation techniques and spotting folklore around various web forums, Slenderman grew from a harmless bit of fun into a viral villain for the web-age. Loab is on her way to toppling Slenderman, because there’s nothing more sinister than AI creating art.
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Ian Dean is Editor, Digital Arts & 3D at Creative Bloq, and the former editor of many leading magazines. These titles included ImagineFX, 3D World and video game titles Play and Official PlayStation Magazine. Ian launched Xbox magazine X360 and edited PlayStation World. For Creative Bloq, Ian combines his experiences to bring the latest news on digital art, VFX and video games and tech, and in his spare time he doodles in Procreate, ArtRage, and Rebelle while finding time to play Xbox and PS5.
