Meet Loab, the AI Demon Now Haunting the Internet

AI-generated characters meet somewhere in the uncanny valley between humans and animation. Our brains cannot understand what we are looking at, which makes characters like Miquela so fascinating to follow. 

And then there are cursed AI characters like Loab.

Loab is a demon who has been making the rounds on Twitter recently. It was created by Supercomposite, a musician and now an instantly infamous AI art generator, who describes in a Twitter thread how messing around with negative prompt weights in an AI art generator created this new urban legend. 

The birth of Loab started with an image created with the prompt “Brando::-1” where Supercomposite was attempting to make something that was the opposite of Marlon Brando. 

A negative prompt is where the AI generator will try to make something that is the complete opposite of the prompt given. Supercomposite was given a logo that he then entered that logo as “DIGITA PNTICS skyline logo::-1” into the negative prompt with hopes that he could get a human-like opposite of Marlon Brando.

The result was these off-putting images that depicted a devastated-looking older woman with defined triangles of what looked to be rosacea on her cheeks. This was the birth of Loab.

The rest of the thread documents Supercomposite’s journey using Loab to create further images, which the AI found the need to produce increasingly violent and disturbing images featuring Loab.  

“The concept of 'Loabness became more abstract to me,” Superccomposite writes on Twitter. “I would include her in prompts that I knew would almost distort her beyond recognition. After she disappeared from the image breeding lineage, she would sometimes reappear, later down the line, out of nowhere.”

The images are definitely disturbing and do become increasingly more unnerving as you journey deeper into the thread, but there seems to be some sort of misunderstanding about what’s really going on with Loab. 

Forbes reports, “The AI is not surfacing Loab images for every negative prompt, what’s being done here is that the original image of Loab is being used in combination with new prompts and other art to create these new images.”

That is, Loab’s signature features are always the same, which shows some interesting AI bias, but Loab is not actively "haunting" negative prompts in AI art generators.  Loab is simply an AI-generated character that doesn’t exist in the real world. Think of it as those creepy chain letters people used to send to each other that said, “Send this to 5 people in the next 37 seconds or you will die instantly.” 

It is interesting to see the birth of an urban legend. The thread is genuinely interesting and a quick look at it shows you how unsettling elements combined with the lore of an actual demon lurking within AI algorithms can create an instant sensation. 

AI can create some haunting images that can serve as inspiration for your next horror story. Check out this TikTok from @robotoverlaords asking AI to show the last selfie ever taken for some apocalyptic inspiration: 

At the end of the day, Loab will become the star of a new Blumhouse movie, and we will all terrify our friends and families by telling the legend of the internet demon. 

What do you think about Loab? Let us know in the comments below!

Source: Supercomposite via Twitter