The Loab character was first discovered in April of this year by 31-year-old artist Steph Swanson, known online as
Images generated by a neural network
She used negative weights that dayhints, a method that theoretically gives the opposite of what you're asking for. Steph's request for the opposite of Marlon Brando led to the creation of the company's logo.
But when she asked the AI for the opposite description of the logo, something unexpected happened.
“I have four images of the same woman,” she says.
Steph had never seen an AI behave like this before.
“If you use negative clues…many times this resulting images are really varied. So it was really unusual to get a bunch of images of the same woman,” the artist continues. “Even if you describe a person in a positive clue… you get people who match that description, but you don't literally get the same person. I knew right away that it was an anomaly.”
She immediately repeated the experiment to see if it was an accident.
“As I ran this clue more and more and kept getting Loab, I thought, ‘Oh, it looks like the only thing that this clue is creating is this woman,’ Steph notes.
The woman in the picture was always sadsometimes with wet cheeks, as if she were crying, with her mouth half open, "as if she were sobbing." One day it appeared next to some garbled text spelling Loab, and the name stuck.
Even stranger, Loab always showed up in the same place: in a house with brownish-green walls, next to cardboard boxes, junk, and the occasional stuffed animal.
Steph decided to try a different technique -cross the Loab image with another image. She chose another AI-generated image made by a friend of hers from the clue: "a hyper-compressed glass tunnel surrounded by angels... Wes Anderson-esque."
For unknown reasons, the result wasterrible, some of the resulting images are so intimidating that Steph doesn't want to publish them. The artist suggested that the AI associates Loab with gore.
Loab herself is oddly persistent, too.Steph continued to cross-breed Loab's looks to dilute her influence, and after several rounds of dilution, the original Loab's image eventually disappeared entirely.
"It took a long time because Loabalmost always showed up,” Steph says. “But what was really interesting was that as I continued to combine images, each of which had less presence of the character, eventually I ended up with an image in which she reappeared. She's like a dominant gene."
Read more:
Created a navigation system that is more accurate than GPS
Look at the result of a "head-on collision" of two galaxies: this is a very rare occurrence.
Named the main danger of the lunar mission "Artemis"