She's out there somewhere, lurking in a parallel universe of possibilities. All you have to do to summon her into being is type the right prompt into an AI image generator.
Like a digital incantation, the words will reveal the eerie face of a middle-aged woman with dead eyes, a vacant stare, and a disturbing grimace.
Her name is Loab (pronounced like 'lobe'), and she was "discovered" by a Swedish-based artist who goes by the name of Supercomposite on Twitter.
Supercomposite is among the first wave of modern creators to explore the realms of text-to-image AI generators. This year, while experimenting with negative prompts (which ask machine learning algorithms to find the extreme opposite of something), the artist stumbled across a creepy face.
When Supercomposite ran the prompt again, they said the same woman came back, this time next to the word 'loab'.
"The AI reproduced her more easily than most celebrities. Her presence is persistent, and she haunts every image she touches," Supercomposite wrote on Twitter in a September 2022 thread about Loab's discovery.
"Take a seat. This is a true horror story and veers sharply macabre."
Very interesting.