Loab

 

Artificial intelligence. Everybody's talking about it. I am also interested in it, but I do consider it something of an overrated subject. A lot of the dread associated with it I doubt is justified. I don't think the electronic overlords are going to take over the world anytime soon; in fact they can't even read a train timetable properly. See here for details: https://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.com/2023/03/should-we-welcome-our-ai-overlords.html and: https://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.com/2021/07/free-will.html. That being said however, occasionally a story comes out of the global cyber-brain world that gives me a chill. In April 2022 an artist from Sweden reported that something extremely sinister had happened when she was messing around with a text-to-image AI model. There was a lot of mystery surrounding this matter at first. The artist originally only called herself "SuperComposite", but it was later revealed that her real name is Stephanie. Her story is that she entered the prompt to make her a picture of the actor Marlon Brando. She then took that image and asked for the opposite of it. She was shown a strange poster-like tableau with a skyline and some unintelligible words. She then asked for the opposite of this second image, perhaps hoping for it to return to some more Brando impressions, but instead something else happened. A picture appeared showing a very ugly and frightening looking woman, illustrated above, something like a witch or zombie. Stephanie called it "Loab" after a word that appeared in an earlier render from the series. When she used the image as a prompt she received a number of increasingly unsightly and disturbing images, all of them depicting some version of the Loab character. When she published these artworks they shocked the world. How on earth did an electronic system possibly generate such a phantasm? It is difficult to know because modern computers are so complex they are essentially chaotic. What's more Stephanie has kept much of Loab's origins private. She won't reveal exactly what software she used or what her exact text prompts were. If she had then lots of people could go out and create their own version of Loab. As it happens they can do this anyway now because Loab has become a viral meme and there are so many online variations of her that all art AI's are able to tap into that from her second-hand popularity. There is even an AI written interview with Loab. Source: https://www.pcgamer.com/ai-image-generaotr-loab-cryptid-supercomposite/.

My guess is that Loab is one of these strange and unpredictable artefacts that emerge out of the near infinite permutations of electronics, something like the Mandelbrot Set, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6BvTKBYBMFY. Possibly Loab was created deliberately by Stephanie as a prank. Her reticence over the character's origins does indicate that. However, there may be another explanation that is rather worrying. Is Stephanie's computer haunted? Could some kind of occult intelligent force be using artificial intelligence to interact with our world? This would make it similar to the electronic voice phenomenon or instrumental trans-communication, for details see: https://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2024/03/gary-sudbrink-phone-calls.html. If that is the case then what kind of intelligence is it? Where does it come from? What does it want with us? Is it safe? Will AI therefore become some kind of Ouija board, potentially dangerous, leaving us vulnerable to possession and manipulation? It could be that AI itself is not a threat, but something else could use it as a tool to invade our universe. In the past lots of other methods have been used to generate portals or bridges that allow dark entities to access our reality. I'm not going to be alarmist, but we do need to be careful about such things.
See here for more information: https://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2022/12/ben-emlyn-jones-on-nocturnal-frequency.html.
And: https://hpanwo-radio.blogspot.com/2022/12/third-rail-radio-programme-131.html.
And: https://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2022/07/ai-created.html.
And: https://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2024/09/seriously-strange-2024-by-neil-ward.html.