It lurks out there in a parallel universe of possibilities. All you have to do to summon it into existence is to type the correct prompt into an AI image generator.
Like a digital spell, words will reveal a middle-aged woman’s eerie face, with dead eyes, blank stares, and an unsettling grimace.
It’s called Loab (pronounced “lobe”) and it was “discovered” by a Swedish artist. supercomposite from Twitter.
Supercomposite is among the first wave of modern creators to explore the world of text-to-image AI generators. This year, while trying the negative cues (this machine learning Algorithms to find the opposite of something), the artist came across a creepy face.
When Supercomposite ran the prompt again, they said the same woman came back, this time next to the word ‘loab’.
“Artificial intelligence reproduced it more easily than most celebrities. Its presence is persistent and haunts every image it touches,” Supercomposite Wrote On Twitter in a September 2022 thread about Loab’s discovery.
“Sit down. It’s a true horror story and it’s sharply creepy.”
With a hook like this, no wonder Loab has taken the internet by storm. The image of this mysterious woman is now so well known that she even has an image of herself. Wikipedia page.
🧵: I discovered this woman I call Loab in April. AI has reproduced it more easily than most celebrities. His presence is persistent and haunts every image he touches. CW: Sit down. It’s a true horror story and it’s sharply creepy. pic.twitter.com/gmUlf6mZtk
— supercomposite (@supercomposite) 6 September 2022
Part of Loab’s mystery is what it represents. Loab’s figure has become a kind of modern time.tronia‘ – a form of art from the Dutch Golden Age that exaggerates the expression of a face – one that It represents an idea, not a person.
Loab’s allegory is a little creepier than this: sayThe subject of the more famous tronie entitled Girl with a Pearl Earring. More profoundly, it wasn’t made by a human artist who could tell us more about the idea they were trying to represent.
Among the hundreds of Loab iterations that Supercomposite calls into existence, many features broken 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 was taking the Loab apart and putting it back together. It’s an island emerging in secret space that we don’t know how to locate with text queries.” author The artist is on Twitter.
“Sooner or later it finds everyone. You just have to know where to look,” Supercomposite additions.
Even when her red cheeks or other prominent features are lost, the “Loabness” of the images she had a hand in the making is undeniable. It haunts images, persists through generations, and subverts other parts of the will because AI optimizes it right in the face so easily. pic.twitter.com/4M7ECWlQRE
— supercomposite (@supercomposite) 6 September 2022
Loab has captured the world’s attention with more than her nightmarish qualities. Ripped off the cliff by what Supercomposite said “urgent statistical accident”The spooky woman represents a new age of creativity for which we may or may not be ready.
Brendan Murphy, photographer and digital media lecturer at the University of Central Queensland in Australia, spends most of his free time contemplating the future of artificial intelligence and exemplifying image and text generators.
He thinks that with the technology booming lately, the art world is headed for a paradigm shift, just like when photography came onto the scene in the early 1800s.
Today, when Murphy uses AI to make art, he sees it as landscape photography, wandering around looking for interesting things to capture. But in this case, the landscape he discovers is a kind of parallel universe of human art.
After all, AI creators are trained in human knowledge, culture, and art traditions, which means we can reasonably do whatever they create.
These unrealized possibilities are now there for people to find, and Murphy and the Supercomposite are among the first to join the hunt.
“There are things that interest you, that you really want to grow, and that you really want to go in that direction,” Murphy explains to ScienceAlert.
“There’s no reason to go that route. And there are probably really good reasons why people shouldn’t go that route at all. Because it’s probably never going to impress anyone or sell anything.”
This does not mean that using AI to make art is pointless. Instead, Murphy says, AI is a tool artists can use to advance their artistic practice. And every once in a while, a worthy figure like Loab emerges from the cliff.
“I think Loab is a great story. It’s not just technology. It’s looking at what drives technology. It’s looking at the possibility of technology,” he explains.
“And I think it’s great. I think it’s a valid piece of art. It’s much more valid than just making a specific AI image. It’s a lot of thought, a lot of experimentation, and a lot of iteration.”
Anne Ploin, a digital sociologist who studies the potential impact of machine learning on creative work at the Oxford Internet Institute, shares a similar view.
“AI models can predict in unexpected ways [and] to draw attention to a factor that is completely unnoticed in a particular painting style,” Ploin says.
“But machine learning models are not autonomous. They will not create new artistic movements on their own.”
Murphy and other art experts think It is doubtful that AI will at least completely wipe out human creativity. After all, art only exists when people value it, and as a species we tend to be quite biased about our abilities.
Murphy says that in the future, AI-generated artworks could prompt us to question artistic conventions and explore our emotional responses to images.
But we are entering a world where many writing and image services are offered. probably becomes unnecessarydeletes the work of many ghostwriters, illustrators, designers and photographers.
The explosion of AI-generated art in recent months has raised concerns that algorithms are robbing artists by copying their different styles.
The best human artists will undoubtedly continue to compete with AI, and Murphy suspects that the most successful in the future will be creators bent on their humanity.
A concrete and real public face and identity may be more important than ever for artists. “No matter how practices like Lensa change the way art is made, the artist’s personality remains an important context for his work,” Murphy said. He recently wrote in The Conversation.
ChatGPT It is an artificial intelligence-based text generator that was publicly released in November 2022. Its name stands for Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer, which has an engine based on evaluating the probability of certain words following each other in a block of text, unlike a supercharged block of text. version of your phone’s predictive text feature.
Like Loab, there seems to be a ghostly presence in the program’s responses that test the limits of human knowledge and creativity. Although it doesn’t take long when the coating falls off and its wires reveal it’s a dice-rolling “parrot” that gambles on generating the right sequences of words to trick us.
Any wisdom it provides is still left up to us to separate 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. AI algorithms can be used to create new forms of art such as music, poetry and visual arts. These algorithms can also be used to analyze and interpret existing works of art in new and interesting ways. Additionally, AI technology is being used to create interactive art installations and performances that can respond and interact with audiences in real time. In general, 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.
