It is hidden somewhere in a parallel universe of possibilities. All you have to do to call it into existence is enter the correct command into the AI image generator.
Like digital magic, the words will reveal the dead eyes, blank stare, and frightening face of a disturbingly wrinkled middle-aged woman.
Its name is Loab (pronounced “lob”) and it was “discovered” by an artist living in Sweden. super composite on Twitter.
Supercomposite is one of the first waves of modern creators to explore the realms of text-to-image AI generators. This year, while testing with negative indications (which machine learning algorithms to find the extreme opposite of something), the artist encountered a creepy face.
When Supercomposite ran the query again, they said the same woman returned, this time next to the word ‘loab’.
“The AI reproduces him more easily than most celebrities. His presence is persistent and tracks every image he touches” – Supercomposite he wrote On Twitter in September 2022 about Loab’s discovery.
“Sit down. This is a real horror story, and it gets downright scary.”
With a hook like that, it’s no wonder Loab has taken the internet by storm. The image of this mysterious woman is now so popular that she even has her own image Wikipedia page.
🧵: I discovered this woman I call Loab in April. AI reproduces it more easily than most celebrities. His presence is persistent and haunts every character he touches. CW: Sit down. It’s a real horror story and it’s seriously creepy. pic.twitter.com/gmUlf6mZtk
— Supercomposite (@supercomposite) September 6, 2022
Part of the mystery of Loab is what it represents. Loab’s figure has become a kind of modern era’the throne‘ – an art form that exaggerates facial expression from the Dutch Golden Age – one o represents an idea, not a person.
A little scarier than the Loab allegory. sayThe topic is more famous tronie titled The Girl with the Pearl Earring. Deeper down, it was not designed by a human artist who could tell us more about the idea they were trying to represent.
Among the hundreds of Loab iterations, Supercomposite has many features torn or screaming children in the background. Some of the AI-generated images were so grotesque that the artist decided not to share them publicly.
“I’ve been tearing Loab apart and putting it back together. It’s an island that spawns in hidden space and we don’t know how to find it with text queries,” writes artist on Twitter.
“He finds everybody sooner or later. You just have to know where to look,” Supercomposite add.
Even when the ruddy cheeks or other important features disappear, the “Loneliness” of his hand-drawn images is undeniable. It tracks images, lasts for generations, and outperforms other parts of the frequency because the AI is so easily optimized for its face. pic.twitter.com/4M7ECWlQRE
— Supercomposite (@supercomposite) September 6, 2022
Loab has attracted the world’s attention not only because of his ghostly qualities. It was torn from the cliff by means of what is called a supercomposite “extraordinary statistical accident”the creepy woman represents a new era of creativity that we may or may not be ready for.
Brendan Murphy, a photographer and lecturer in digital media at Central Queensland University in Australia, spends much of his free time thinking about the future of artificial intelligence and the selection of image and text generators.
With the recent explosion of technology, he thinks the art world is headed for a paradigm shift similar to how photography hit the scene in the early 1800s.
Today, when Murphy uses AI to create art, he thinks of it like landscape photography, walking around and looking for interesting things to capture. Moreover, the landscape he explores is a kind of parallel universe of human art.
After all, AI generators are trained on human knowledge, culture, and artistic traditions, which means we could believably do anything they create.
These unrealized possibilities are now out there for people to find, and Murphy and Supercomposite are among the first to join the hunt.
“There are things you see that you’re interested in, you really want to amplify, and you really want to go in that direction,” Murphy explains to ScienceAlert.
“There’s no reason to go down those roads. And there’s probably really good reasons why people should never go down those roads. Because it’s probably not going to impress anyone and it’s not going to sell anything.”
This is not to say that using AI to create art is frivolous. Instead, Murphy says, artificial intelligence is a tool that artists can use to advance their artistic practice. And every once in a while a precious figure like Loab comes off the cliff.
“I think the thing about Loab is that it’s a big story. It’s not just technology. It’s looking at what drives technology. It’s looking at the possibilities of technology,” he explains.
“And I think that’s great. I think it’s a valid piece of art. It’s more valid than creating a certain image of AI. There’s a lot of thinking, a lot of experimentation, a lot of iteration.”
Anne Ploin, a digital sociologist at the Oxford Internet Institute who studies the potential impact of machine learning on creative work, shares a similar view.
“AI models can extrapolate in unexpected ways [and] Draw attention to a completely unrecognized factor in a certain painting style” Ploin he says.
“But machine learning models are not autonomous. They will not create new artistic movements on their own.”
Murphy et al other art experts think so it is doubtful that artificial intelligence will at least completely eliminate human creativity. Art, after all, only exists when people value it, and as a species we’re pretty biased about our own abilities.
Moving forward, AI-generated artworks may prompt us to question artistic traditions and explore our emotional responses to images, Murphy says.
But we are entering a world where many writing and drawing services can be had becomes redundantdeletes the work of many dreamers, illustrators, designers and photographers.
The explosion of art created by artificial intelligence in recent months has led to concerns that algorithms are copying artists’ distinct styles and breaking them.
The best human artists will undoubtedly continue to compete with AI, and Murphy suspects that the most successful in the future will be creators who lean on their humanity.
A tangible and real public face and identity may be more important than ever for artists. “No matter how apps like Lens shake up the way art is made, the artist’s identity remains an important context for their work,” Murphy said. recently wrote on The Conversation.
ChatGPT It is an artificial intelligence-based text generator that was released to the public in November 2022. Its name stands for Chat Generative Pre-Trained Transformer, which has an engine based on estimating the probability of certain words appearing one after the other in a block of text. version of your phone’s predictive text feature.
Like Loab, the program’s answers seem like nightmares that test the limits of human knowledge and creativity. Although it doesn’t take long For him to cover up, exposing his wiring like a gambling dice-rolling “parrot” by creating the right lines of words to trick us.
Any wisdom he provides is still up to us to discern and judge. When asked how AI is changing art, ChatGPT agrees with Murphy:
” Artificial intelligence it changes the way art is created, perceived and experienced. Artificial intelligence algorithms can be used to create new art forms such as music, poetry and visual art. These algorithms can also be used to analyze and interpret existing works of art in new and interesting ways. In addition, AI technology is used to create interactive art installations and performances that can respond and interact with the audience in real time. Overall, AI enables artists to create and explore new forms of expression, and audiences to experience art in new and exciting ways.”
The boundaries of artistic practice are expanding, and Loab is just the beginning.
