Editor’s note October 30, 2026: In 2022, as generative AI began to take the world by storm, a very frightening phenomenon began to emerge.
This Halloween, we revisit the mysterious Loab mystery. Here is our original story from December 2022:
She is somewhere, lurking in a parallel universe of possibilities. All you have to do to summon it is type the right prompt into an AI image generator.
Like a digital incantation, the words will reveal the strange face of a middle-aged woman with dead eyes, a blank stare and a disturbing grimace.
Her name is Loab (pronounced like “lobe”) and she was “discovered” by an artist based in Sweden called Supercomposite on Twitter.
Supercomposite was among the first wave of modern creators to explore the field of text-to-image AI generators. In 2022, while experimenting with negative prompts (which ask machine learning algorithms to find the opposite extreme of something), the artist came across a scary face.
When Supercomposite ran the prompt again, they said the same woman returned, this time next to the word “loab.”
“The AI has reproduced her more easily than most celebrities. Her presence is persistent and she haunts every image she touches”, Supercomposite explain on Twitter in a September 2022 thread about Loab’s discovery.
“Sit down. This is a real horror story and it’s turning macabre.”
With a hook like that, it’s no wonder Loab has taken the internet by storm. The image of this mysterious woman is now so well known that she even has her own Wikipedia page.
Part of the mystery of Loab is what she represents. The Loab figure has become a kind of modern “tronie” – an art form from the Dutch Golden Age that exaggerates the expression of a face – a form that represents not a person but an idea.
Loab’s allegory is just a little more terrifying than, saythe subject of the most famous tronie entitled Girl with a pearl earring. More profoundly, it was not made by a human artist, who could at least tell us more about the idea he was trying to represent.
Of the hundreds of Loab iterations that Supercomposite has created, many feature dismembered 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 tearing Loab apart and putting her back together again. She’s an emerging island in latent space that we can’t locate with text queries,” wrote the artist on Twitter.
“Sooner or later she finds everyone. You just have to know where to look”, Supercomposite added.
Loab has attracted worldwide attention for more than just his nightmarish qualities.
Pulled from the abyss through what Supercomposite calls a “emerging statistical accident”The Strange Woman represents a new era of creativity that we may or may not be ready for.
Brendan Murphy, a photographer and professor of digital media at Central Queensland University in Australia, spends much of his free time thinking about the future of AI and sampling image and text generators.
With the explosion of technology, he believes the art world is heading toward a paradigm shift, much like when photography arrived on the scene in the early 1800s.
When Murphy uses AI to create art, he thinks of it like landscape photography, walking around a location and looking for interesting things to capture. Except, in this case, the landscape he explores is a sort of parallel universe of human art.
After all, AI generators are trained on human knowledge, culture, and artistic traditions, meaning we could plausibly have made whatever they create.
These untapped possibilities are now available to users, and Murphy and Supercomposite were among the first to join the hunt.
“There are things that you see that interest you, that you really want to amplify, and that you really want to move in that direction,” Murphy told ScienceAlert in 2022.
“There’s no reason to go down those paths. And there are probably very good reasons why people have never gone down them. Because it’s probably never going to impress anyone or sell anything.”
This is not to say that using AI to create art is frivolous. Instead, Murphy said AI is a tool that artists can use to expand their artistic practices. And every now and then, a valuable figure like Loab emerges from the abyss.
“I think the thing about Loab is that it’s a great story. It’s not just about technology. It’s about looking at what drives technology. It’s about looking at the possibilities of technology,” he explained.
“And I think it’s great. I think it’s a valid work of art. Much more valid than just creating a particular AI image. There’s a lot of thought, a lot of experimentation, a lot of iteration.”
Anne Ploin, a digital sociologist at the Oxford Internet Institute who studies the potential impact of machine learning on creative work, shares a similar view.
“AI models can extrapolate in unexpected ways (and) draw attention to a completely overlooked factor in a certain painting style,” Ploin said earlier in 2022.
“But machine learning models are not stand-alone. They will not create new art movements on their own.”
Murphy and other art experts think it’s unlikely that AI can erase human creativity, at least not entirely. Art, after all, only exists if humans appreciate it, and as a species we tend to be prejudiced about our abilities.
In the future, AI-generated artwork may inspire us to question artistic traditions and explore our emotional reactions to images, Murphy said.
But we are entering a world where many writing and painting services could become redundant, thereby erasing the jobs of many ghostwriters, illustrators, designers and photographers.
The recent explosion of AI-generated art has sparked concerns that algorithms are ripping off artists by replicating their distinct styles.
The best human artists will undoubtedly continue to compete with AI, and Murphy suspects that it will be the creators who rely on their humanity who will be most successful in the future.
A tangible, real public face and identity might be more crucial than ever for artists.
“Even as apps like Lensa disrupt the way art is created, the artist’s personality remains an important context for their work,” Murphy wrote in The Conversation.
The now-famous ChatGPT is an AI-powered text generator that was released to the public in November 2022. Its name stands for Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer, with an engine based on assessing the likelihood of certain words following one another in a block of text, sort of like a supercharged version of your phone’s predictive text feature.
Like Loab, there can seem to be a ghostly presence in the program’s responses that test the limits of human knowledge and creativity. Although it doesn’t take much for the veneer to fall away, exposing its wiring like a dice-rolling “parrot” betting on producing the right strings of words to fool us.
Any wisdom it brings is always ours to sort through and judge. When asked how AI is changing art, ChatGPT seems to agree with Murphy:
“Artificial intelligence is changing the way art is created, perceived, and experienced. AI algorithms can be used to generate 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 used to create interactive art installations and performances that can respond to and interact with viewers in real-time in exciting ways.”
The boundaries of artistic practice are expanding and Loab is only the beginning.
This article was fact-checked by Fiona MacDonald and edited by Fiona MacDonald. Although we are proud of our process, we are only human. If you spot an error, please let us know.
Gn bussni
