We tend to think of Artificial Intelligence as a tool—a cold, mathematical calculator that does exactly what we tell it to. But what happens when the machine starts remembering a face you never asked for?
At What Then Archives, we usually explore history's forgotten mysteries. But in our latest video, we examine a haunting that happened in the digital age. Meet Loab, the internet's first AI-generated cryptid.
The Birth of a Digital Ghost
The story begins in April 2022 with a Swedish artist named Steph Maj Swanson, known online as Super Composite. She was testing an early AI image generator, experimenting with a technique called "negative prompt weights."
Instead of telling the AI what to draw, she told it what not to draw. She asked for the mathematical opposite of "Marlon Brando." The AI gave her a strange, nonsensical corporate logo with the text DIGITA PNTICS.
Curious, she then asked the AI for the opposite of that logo. She expected a picture of Marlon Brando. Instead, she got her.
She Wouldn't Leave
The result was a series of images of an older woman with hollow, red-rimmed eyes and distinct triangles of rosacea on her cheeks. The artist named her "Loab."
But the horror wasn't just in her appearance; it was in her persistence.
"Every time she tried a new prompt, Loab came back. Hiding in landscapes, shapes, even other people's faces. The AI seemed obsessed."
When Super Composite tried to combine Loab's image with other, innocent prompts (like "a tunnel of angels"), the AI ignored the innocent instructions. Loab would reappear, often dragging the image into disturbing territory. For some reason, the AI's internal map (the "latent space") associated this woman with gore, violence, and blood.
Ghost or Glitch?
Loab isn't a ghost in the traditional sense. She is a statistical anomaly—a cluster of data buried deep in the AI's code that, once triggered, is almost impossible to turn off. She is a reminder that even the creators of these systems don't fully know what is sleeping in their data.
See the Images
What does "the first cryptid of the latent space" actually look like? We explore the timeline of her discovery and the disturbing images that followed in our latest breakdown.
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