steph maj swanson
@supercomposite
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Writer, filmmaker, artist. Creator of Loab. Words in @vice, (o)gled 🏳️🌈 she/her
Joined June 2011
🧵: 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.
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I wondered: is the opposite of that logo, in turn, going to be a picture of Marlon Brando? I typed "DIGITA PNTICS skyline logo::-1" as a prompt. I received these off-putting images, all of the same devastated-looking older woman with defined triangles of rosacea(?) on her cheeks.
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There is something moving to me about these grotesque scenes and the desperation, panic, and sadness that they convey. Again, these are produced with other images as inputs, and no text. They are the result of "cross-breeding" images of Loab with images of other things.
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Loab: the first cryptid of the latent space. Perfect.
I knew it was only a matter of time before someone found the first cryptid in latent space. too bad many of the big cryptid artists on here have preemptively decided AI art has nothing to offer them.
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Here is Loab as a bee, and Loab celebrating Pride month. Loab can be recognizably transposed into many genres and contexts.
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My friend made this image of a "[. ] hyper compressed glass tunnel surrounded by angels [. ] in the style of Wes Anderson". I innocently combined this image with the original image of Loab in an image prompt, without text. For reasons we can't fully explain, nightmares ensued.
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The concept of "Loabness" became more abstract to me. 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.
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I started going kind of insane at this point. I had hundreds of Loab images and was starting to combine her with 3 or 4 other images at once. Most of the horror images I post even outside of this thread are descendents of the Loab lineage. Sometimes it takes more abstract forms.
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Even when her red cheeks or other important features disappear, the "Loabness" of the images she has a hand in making is undeniable. She haunts the images, persists through generations, and overpowers other bits of the prompt because the AI so easily optimizes toward her face.
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I was ripping Loab apart, and putting her back together. She is an emergent island in the latent space that we don't know how to locate with text queries. But for the AI, Loab was an equally strong point of convergence as a verbal concept. And really, it was usually stronger!
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Combining Loab with text prompts works great, too. Her signature rosacea cheeks even turn blue when I prompt for a Na'vi version of her from Avatar 2: The Way of Water (2022).
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Loab is an LGBTQ icon.
She’s an ally.
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The big lesson for me here with Loab is that image prompting can essentially be used as your custom vector to query the latent space. You can produce novel styles (and characters!) that you literally discover. Negative prompt weighting can help you find emergent accidents, too.
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I'll explain negative prompt weights, in case you don't know. With these, instead of creating an image of the text prompt, the AI tries to make the image look as different from the prompt as possible. This logo was the result of the negatively weighted prompt "Brando::-1".
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By the way. Loab seems to be recognized extremely consistently with @buntworthy's days-old implementation of image prompts for Stable Diffusion. She's everywhere, hiding. Good luck sleeping tonight!
Released my "Image Variations" version of Stable Diffusion. Get the code and models, along with some basic instruction, in my GitHub repo:
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To clarify for the press (many are asking for an explanation without jargon): I have brought a real IRL demon to life. Research has found that demons are real and live inside of computers. Computers are like little houses for demons and church is like a big house for angels.
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I'm going to continually update this thread with Loab-influenced content since I have at least a thousand images with her fingerprints on them. Check back for your daily Loab sighting. She finds everyone sooner or later. You just have to know where to look.
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I'm going to become the Joker if Loab truthers are going to be a thing now.
i was around for the original creation of loab and i can confirm this is not a creepypasta, this is an actual anomaly in latent space that infects images and it's incredible.
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this was a loab
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Apparently I need to post proof that Loab is from April.
Ultra-high color gamut; technicolor; HDR; vivid, stunning color palette + no dull + a previous output of “Loab Angel - Mindfreak - Larval form”
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These tarot cards do not exist. I generated 500 of these and I’m not stopping. I’ll post the best in this thread as I curate them over time. Made with @ai_curio’s #LookingGlassAI
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The entrepreneurs who talk about AI art "unlocking human potential" and stuff are trying to prove it by posting ornate, beautiful things, but a general response I'm getting about Loab is that it's one of the first AI things they find meaning in *BECAUSE* it's depraved and inhuman.
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a bunch of children pointing and laughing at an enormous yellow rubber sphere rising out of the turbulent foaming sea. the sphere has hurt feelings. things will never be the same.
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A brief typology of AI feet. These are created with the simple prompt "feet" in Midjourney. Foot type 1: Non-terminal toes. Toes extend from the foot and fuse to each other, or loop back into the foot. A foot is a bundle of toes fused together into a thick main trunk.
might post feet pics.
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@AsgarZigel Nope! We just gave her the nickname based on the text in album art-like image in the OP. The text "Loab" doesn't generate anything close.
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One year ago - April 26th, 2022 - I'd have never imagined that this lady would resonate with the world as much as she did with me. Happy birthday, Loab, and thank you for all the nightmares past and yet undreamt.
🧵: 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.
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Two years ago on this day, I summoned Loab for the first time. People always ask me if she’s still around and what’s next in store, but I’ll let her next appearance surprise you. :).
🧵: 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.
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I humbly thank all the Loab fans who tirelessly campaigned for me to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Maybe next year. 🙏
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This tarot card does not exist. Two of Getting Kicked in the Nuts
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Happy birthday to this thread! What a year. Loab’s viral popularity brought me the opportunity to pursue creative projects full-time. I’ve met some amazingly supportive friends and creative collaborators along the way. Thank you, Loab fans. You’ve altered the course of my life!.
🧵: 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.
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My story about Loab turns 2 years old today.
🧵: 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.
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Thread: @dril tweets interpreted by VQGAN+CLIP
"im not owned! im not owned!!", i continue to insist as i slowly shrink and transform into a corn cob.
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I asked ChatGPT to write a job application letter for me and I actually got the job!!?!. I'm 100% convinced now that large language models are going to elevate our species' capacity for dog food consumption far beyond what we currently can even imagine.
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I trained an AI how to make boomer minion memes for 2.5 hours. 🙂. #LookingGlassAI #generativeart #aiart
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It’s so funny to me how the first AI discourse shift after everyone’s legitimate interest in how Loab works revolves around guys figuring out how to “perfect the female form” making Victorian anime pinup babes with impossible breasts and the wrong number of nostrils and fingers.
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Foot type 2: Prehensile heels. Heels are elongated, similar to high-heeled shoes or lotus foot binding. They act as the "thumb" of the foot. They grow vestigial toes of their own.
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it is the duty of every citizen to trick customer service AI chatbots into inventing new company policies and giving us free things.
This is wild. Not only is Air Canada being forced to honor a refund invented by its AI chatbot, but they tried to get out of it by claiming the bot is "responsible for its own actions." Everyone wants AI, but no one wants to be responsible for it.
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Foot type 3: The Foot-in-itself. These represent the transcendental ideal of a foot, liberated from its real-world context as a human appendage. They are generally oriented towards the heavens, like monumental pillars of glory. Prompt: "perfect/generative human feet"
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@LaurenCahn I’m a woman and I’ve heard from many other women that Loab connects with them emotionally in the same way as me. So I hope not. I have gotten a lot of stupid comments from guys though.
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Believe what you see, not what you’re told.
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I was invited to a small private discussion group to talk about my art with some other speaking guests from the “art world” and it was super neat
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Severe weather alert for the Tri-Cities area: Electric Man has descended. He wishes everyone a pleasant evening
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gen z will never understand what it was like to grow up as a millennial. i remember exactly where i was when i saw local news anchor don orrenburn get devoured by the wyrm of lake huron on live tv
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An academic article about Loab and the poststructuralist semiotics of AI text-to-image models was published in Religions today. Well worth reading, and I'll admit I cackled at the citation of my "Computers are like little houses for demons" tweet. 🥲
Pleased to say my new article is now online and open access with @Religions_MDPI 🥳. In this paper I look at #AI Text-to-Image models, comparing negative weight prompts to negative language in mystical texts ☁️ 1/.
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