{"id":167349,"date":"2022-12-24T20:42:08","date_gmt":"2022-12-24T20:42:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/harchi90.com\/a-nightmare-face-is-haunting-ai-art-and-theres-a-reason-we-shouldnt-look-away-sciencealert\/"},"modified":"2022-12-24T20:42:08","modified_gmt":"2022-12-24T20:42:08","slug":"a-nightmare-face-is-haunting-ai-art-and-theres-a-reason-we-shouldnt-look-away-sciencealert","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/harchi90.com\/a-nightmare-face-is-haunting-ai-art-and-theres-a-reason-we-shouldnt-look-away-sciencealert\/","title":{"rendered":"A Nightmare Face Is Haunting AI Art, And There’s A Reason We Shouldn’t Look Away : ScienceAlert"},"content":{"rendered":"
She’s out there somewhere, lurking in a parallel universe of possibilities. All you have to do to summon her into being is type the right prompt into an AI image generator.<\/p>\n
Like a digital incantation, the words will reveal the eerie face of a middle-aged woman with dead eyes, a vacant stare, and a disturbing grimace.<\/p>\n
Her name is Loab (pronounced like ‘lobe’), and she was “discovered” by a Swedish-based artist who goes by the name of supercomposite<\/a> on Twitter.<\/p>\n Supercomposite is among the first wave of modern creators to explore the realms of text-to-image AI generators. This year, while experimenting with negative prompts (which ask machine learning algorithms to find the extreme opposite of something), the artist stumbled across a creepy face.<\/p>\n When Supercomposite ran the prompt again, they said the same woman came back, this time next to the word ‘loab’.<\/span><\/p>\n “The AI \u200b\u200breproduced her more easily than most celebrities. Her presence is persistent, and she haunts every image she touches,” Supercomposite wrote<\/a> on Twitter in a September 2022 thread about Loab’s discovery.<\/p>\n “Take a seat. This is a true horror story and veers sharply macabre.”<\/p>\n With a hook like that, it’s no wonder Loab proceeded to take the internet by storm. The image of this mysterious woman is now so well-known she even has her own Wikipedia page.<\/p>\n \ud83e\uddf5: I discovered this woman, who I call Loab, in April. The AI \u200b\u200breproduced 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<\/a><\/p>\n \u2014 Supercomposite (@supercomposite) September 6, 2022<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Part of Loab’s mystery is what she represents. Loab’s figure has become a sort of modern-day ‘tronie’ \u2013 a type of artform from the Dutch Golden Age that exaggerates the expression of a face \u2013 one that<\/span> doesn’t represent a person but an idea.<\/p>\n The allegory of Loab is just a bit more terrifying than, count<\/a>the subject of the more famous tronie titled Girl With A Pearl Earring<\/em>. More profoundly, it wasn’t made by a human artist who can tell us more about the idea they were trying to represent.<\/p>\n Among the hundreds of Loab iterations Supercomposite has summoned into being, many feature dismembered or screaming children<\/a> in the background. Some AI-generated images were so grotesque that the artist decided not to share them publicly.<\/p>\n “I was ripping Loab apart and putting her back together. She is an emergent island in the latent space that we don’t know how to locate with text queries,” writes<\/a> the artist on Twitter.<\/p>\n “She finds everyone sooner or later. You just have to know where to look,” Supercomposite adds<\/a>.<\/p>\n Even when her red cheeks or other important features disappear, the “Loabness” of the images she has a hand in making is undeniable. She haunts the images, persists through generations, and overpowers other bits of the prompt because the AI \u200b\u200bso easily optimizes toward her face. pic.twitter.com\/4M7ECWlQRE<\/a><\/p>\n \u2014 Supercomposite (@supercomposite) September 6, 2022<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n
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