Meet Loab, an imagined woman painted by an AI that has been haunting people all over the internet with her gaunt features and consistently ghoulish scenarios. AI generated art is a little creepy anyway, but to find the same face staring back at you in increasingly nasty settings is, frankly, horrifying.
Whether it's Slenderman or Vigo the Carpathian, digital art and paintings have been giving us the creeps for decades. It really wasn't going to take long for art generated by an AI to join the party, after allShe's the 'creation' of Twitter poster, musician and AI art fiddlerwho accidently stumbled onto Loab when they were messing about in an unnamed AI art generator.
🧵: I discovered this woman, who I call Loab, in April. The AI reproduced 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/gmUlf6mZtkArt generated by AI is often weird and creepy, as it's the distillation of an algorithm smudging together random but associated images into one scenario, commanded by a particular style or wording.
What Loab tells us is how we love to see stories and read into images and art things that aren't there. I mentioned Slenderman in my intro, this was arguably the first online meme mythos. Created by Eric Knudsen in 2009 using early Photoshop manipulation techniques and spotting folklore around various web forums, Slenderman grew from a harmless bit of fun into a viral villain for the web-age. Loab is on her way to toppling Slenderman, because there’s nothing more sinister than AI creating art.