Infocult: Uncanny Informatics

An AI dreams of the Isle of the Dead

AI drawing programs are all over the place today, and naturally some have turned them to dark ends.

As a sample, let me share some versions of "Isle of the Dead," drawn by Stable Diffusion.

The rise of Loab: an AI generates a new monster

An AI wrangler created a monster, which apparently kept haunting their subsequent work.

Her name is Loab.  She appears as a "devastated-looking older woman with defined triangles of rosacea(?) on her cheeks."

Apparently Loab persisted in a lot of the creator's work: "her combined traits are still a cohesive concept for the AI, and almost all descendent images contain a recognizable Loab."  And it became an obsession:

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. But for the AI, Loab was an equally strong point of convergence as a verbal concept. And really, it was usually stronger!

One commentator sees Loab as a historical horror moment: "I knew it was only a matter of time before someone found the first cryptid in latent space. . ."

Loab may be with us for a while:

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 so easily optimizes toward her face.

Welcome, you terrifying creature, to the haunted internet.