Artificial Intelligence and Mythology: The Loab Incident and the Origin of Digital Entities

The figure named Loab, which emerged during experiments conducted by Swedish musician and artist Steph Maj Swanson on an AI image generator in late 2022, resonated widely across the internet world.

Swanson encountered Loab during a process where they gave negatively weighted prompts to the AI model, causing it to produce the exact opposite of the desired result. The resulting figure drew attention with its grotesque and eerie appearance featuring decayed eye sockets, gaunt facial features, and skin-like texture.

According to an evaluation written by Dr. Russell Moul, the emergence of such digital entities can be seen as a modern reflection of humanity's historical attempts to establish interaction with the unknown and otherworldly beings. Loab's visual characteristics bring along questions regarding the intersection point of artificial intelligence's complex algorithms and mythological archetypes.