Meet Loab, the AI-generated art that will give you nightmares. Plus, the future of in-home robot helpers.
In today’s email:
Meet Loab, the incredibly horrific-looking AI “woman” that took our nightmares by storm.
Will your next robot vacuum have arms and make sandwiches?
Prompt ideas for your next AI-generated art piece.
2 Stories You Need to Know
Meet Loab, the AI-generated “woman” that will fuel your nightmares.
Hey everyone, meet Loab (pronounced “Lobe”), the AI art that your worst nightmares can’t even compete against.
The 🥩 of it:
Loab was introduced to the world on Sept. 6th from Twitter user @supercomposite (real name Steph Maj Swanson).
As you know — Thanks to programs like DALL-E, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion, digital AI art is booming. And in most cases, the art is generated using text prompts from users.
But Steph discovered Loeb by using a negative prompt in an art piece she was working on.
Negative prompts tell the program to create the opposite of the prompt, i.e. things you don’t want included in the next round.
Negative prompt examples, thanks to Aayush Agrawal
After adding negative prompts, the AI created pictures showing a horrifying, long-haired, older woman with rosy cheeks.
Steph named her Loab, because one of the images generated text that says "LOAB."
“I got four images of the same woman,” she says. “Even if you describe a person in a positive prompt … you get people that match that description, but you don’t get literally the same person. I immediately recognized this is an anomaly.”
Next, Steph started using Loab as a base for more images, essentially asking the program for more art that combines other images with her latest creation.
This spawned all types of grim and violent images — with headless humans, and children with horrifying faces emerging from the AI's computations.
Steph says that the woman in the images was always sad, sometimes wet-cheeked like she’d been crying, and with her mouth half open.
Again and again, Loab seemed to appear in the same location: in a house with brownish-green walls, in a room full of junk, and the occasional stuffed toy.
Steph decided to try a different technique – crossbreeding Loab’s image with another image.
She chose to crossbreed Loab with another AI-generated image a friend had made, from the prompt: “hyper-compressed glass tunnel surrounded by angels … in the style of Wes Anderson”.
Oh that sounds nice. Surely this will be beautiful.
I’m not going to sleep tonight.
Some of the images the AI generated are so graphic that Steph isn’t even releasing them.
When attempting new prompts with Loab, the AI kept generating more gruesome images, suggesting that the AI only associates Loab with horror and gore.
No one really understands why the AI is creating such gruesome images with these prompts. And, to be fair, there’s no way for us to know if Steph purposely used gruesome prompts to help generate the art — but, something tells me we’re just scratching the surface on AI conspiracy theories and nightmare fuel.
Will your next Roomba have arms and make sandwiches?
It doesn’t take much to amaze me. I watch in amazement every day as my robot vacuum maneuvers my home looking for dirt and leftover crumbs from our toddler. Just today, we put batteries in a new toy for our 5-month-old that uses Roomba-like sensors to allow it to roll around our floors safely — and, again, I watched in amazement.
Multiply that by 100, and you have humanoid robots that Tesla and Google are working on.
The 🥩 of it:
At Tesla's 2022 AI Day, Elon revealed a working prototypes of Optimus: a walking humanoid built with off-the-shelf parts.
Though it currently walks like an 80 year old woman, I can already imagine where this could be heading.
Optimus is built using Tesla's self-driving AI. Instead navigating roads, the AI has been built to navigate buildings, detecting objects and humans. During his presentation at AI Day, Elon said the robot was designed to be the kind of in-home helper you might one day buy as a gift for your parents.
This year: a digital photo frame. Next year: a literal robot.
Tesla ain’t the only company going for this future market, though. Google has been working towards giving their machine learning brain its very own robot body.
In 2022, Google put its AI technology, called PaLM-SayCan, into robots built by Everyday Robots (a company formed out of Google's X initiative). Instead of being programmed with commands like, "If this, then that," the robot brain uses machine learning to understand vague instructions like, "I'm hungry," and then it works out the steps to solve the problem.
So, we aren’t at the Westworld stages of AI robotics just yet. But judging by the video of Google’s humanoid robot picking up a sponge to clean up a mess, they’re at least more helpful around the house than a 3-year-old.
3 rad things to check out
Do you need prompt ideas for your AI-generated art? Bookmark this site.
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