Steph Maj Swanson - Multimedia Artist & Critical AI Discourse

About

Photo by Kristina Chap

Steph Maj Swanson is a multimedia artist, writer, filmmaker, and public speaker based out of Sweden. Widely known online as Supercomposite, she founded Supercomposite Images as the home for her creative work.

Follow Steph's social media channels for updates on current works and ongoing activities:

For general enquiries, speaking engagements, or commission requests, please email contact@supercompo.site.

Visual Art

LOAB™

Steph Maj Swanson gained international recognition as creator of the Loab cryptid. Steph's story about the character sparked global conversations about AI ethics and creative expression. Featured across major media outlets including Rolling Stone, Der Spiegel, Artnet News, BBC Radio, ABC, Forbes, The Atlantic, and Smithsonian Magazine.

Loab sparked some lengthy ethical conversations around visual aesthetics, art and technology.

Smithsonian Magazine

The thread, with its genuinely interesting and unsettling elements combined with the mythos of an actual demon lurking within AI algorithms, is something that will probably have the movie rights auctioned off to Netflix by the end of the day.

Forbes

Loab might seem like standard creepypasta, but her origins are a whole lot more mysterious.

Rolling Stone

The Loab phenomenon was even featured in "Negative Capabilities: Investigating Apophasis in AI Text-to-Image Models" published in the journal Religions (June 2023), demonstrating its impact in theological and AI studies.

To learn more about Loab, visit loab.ai, read the original viral Twitter thread, or explore the comprehensive archive of publications, media, and appearances below:

Publications & Media Archive

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Origins & Artist's Websites

X (Twitter) – September 2022 – Original Loab thread
Artist Website – https://supercompo.site/
Loab Website – https://loab.ai/

Articles and Books

PC Gamer – Katie Wickens, Sep 7, 2022 – AI image generator births the horrific "first cryptid of the latent space"
IGN – Anthony Wood, Sep 7, 2022 – Meet Loab: The Terrifying Face The Internet Has Dubbed the First AI Art Cryptid
Creative Bloq – Ian Dean, Sep 8, 2022 – This AI art-generated woman is freaking out the internet
CNET – Jackson Ryan, Sep 8, 2022 – Loab, the Creepy AI Art-Generated Woman, Explained
Rolling Stone – Miles Klee, Sep 8, 2022 – Who Is Loab, the AI-Generated Apparition Haunting Our Timelines?
Artnet News – Dorian Batycka, Sep 12, 2022 – Meet 'Loab,' the Latest Example of A.I.-Generated Art Creeping Out the Internet
IFLScience – Staff, Sep 12, 2022 – "Loab": Why Does AI Keep Generating Images Of This (Slightly Terrifying) Woman
Analytics Drift – Sahil Pawar, Sep 12, 2022 – Strange woman dubbed 'Loab' keeps appearing in images created by AI tools
Open Data Science – Staff, Sep 2022 – Everyone Meet Loab, the Internet's First Terrifying AI Cryptid
Smithsonian Magazine – Nina Raemont, Sep 13, 2022 – Who Is the Woman Haunting A.I.-Generated Art?
TechCrunch – Devin Coldewey, Sep 13, 2022 – A terrifying AI-generated woman is lurking in the abyss of latent space
The Mary Sue – Staff, Sep 13, 2022 – A New AI Demon Has Dropped, and Her Name is Loab
de Volkskrant (NL) – Laurens Verhagen, Sep 23, 2022 – De geest in de machine
Der Spiegel (DE) – Jörg Breithut, Sep 25, 2022 – Woher kommen die KI-Monster?
The Atlantic – Stephen Marche, Sep 27, 2022 – We're Witnessing the Birth of a New Artistic Medium
Dazed – Thom Waite, Sep 2022 – Loab: the horrifying cryptid haunting AI's latent space
New Scientist – Matthew Sparkes, Sep 2022 – Why do AIs keep creating nightmarish images of strange characters?
Distractify – Jennifer Tisdale, Sep 2022 – "She Looks Like a Nice Computer-Generated Lady…" (EXCLUSIVE)
Medium – Ceren Aceaser, 2022 – AI caught a case of the zeitgeists, what Loab's arrival really means
The Mary Sue – Interview, Oct 20, 2022 – INTERVIEW: Meet Supercomposite, Creator of The AI Demon Loab
ABC Background Briefing — Ange Lavoipierre, Nov 25, 2022 — "A journey inside our unimaginable future"
Digital Journal – Paul Wallis, Nov 26, 2022 – Op-Ed: 'Loab' – AI-scripted ugliness and threats of 'reality collapse'
Boing Boing – Staff, Nov 30, 2022 – Who is "Loab" and what lesson about AI is she trying to teach us?
ScienceAlert – Carly Cassella, Dec 2022 – A Nightmare Face Is Haunting AI Art, And There's A Reason We Shouldn't Look Away
Galleries West – Sarah Swan, Dec 27, 2022 – You Want It Darker?
The Washington Post – Tatum Hunter, Jan 18, 2023 – When you should (and shouldn't) rely on AI tools
WIRED – Joel Warner, Feb 2023 – The ChatGPT Reincarnation of the Marquis de Sade Is Coming
Religions – Hannah Lucas, Jun 2023 – "Negative Capabilities: Investigating Apophasis in AI Text-to-Image Models"
Rue Morgue – Forest Williams, Sep 2023 – "Ghosts in the Machine: Meet Loab, A Recurring Nightmare That Crawled From The Mind of AI, and the World's First Cyber-Cryptid" pp. 18-19 (print only)
Der Spiegel (DE) – Interview, Dec 28, 2023 – »Jemand sagte mir, ich hätte einen Dämon erschaffen«
VICE – Staff, Aug 9, 2024 – Why Does This Horrifying Woman Keep Appearing in AI-Generated Images?
DN (SV) – Viktor Andersson, Oct 25, 2024 – "AI-demon" upptäckt av svensk – kan bli Hollywoodfilm
Yahoo News – ScienceAlert, Oct 31, 2024 – The Creepy True Story of The Nightmare Face Haunting The Internet
UNT (SV) – Maria Larsdotter, Nov 2, 2024 – Uppsalakonstnären om sin AI-demon "Loab": "Jag fick en chock"
Critical AI – Eryk Salvaggio, Caroline Sinders & Steph Maj Swanson, Jan 17, 2025 – Cultural Red Teaming: ARRG! & Creative Misuse of AI Systems
Critical Meme Reader III: Breaking the Meme – Gabriele de Seta, May 2024 – An Algorithmic Folklore: Vernacular Creativity in Times of Everyday Automation pp. 234-354 (mentions Loab in context of algorithmic folklore)
The Unseen Internet: Conjuring the Occult in Digital Discourse – Shira Chess, Feb 2025 – MIT Press (mentions Loab in context of digital occult discourse)
Aya Data – Staff, Mar 2025 – Digital Cryptids: How AI is Making Monsters
Wikipedia – Community-edited, Jun 27, 2025 – Loab

Conferences

Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade – Nov 2024 – "AI's Katabatic Turn - Data belongs to the Underworld"
IDA (Danish Society of Engineers), Copenhagen – Aug 2024 – Queers in the Machine Symposium
Chaos Communication Congress, Hamburg – Dec 28, 2023 – "What I Learned from LOAB™: AI as a creative adversary"
Svenska Tecknare, Stockholm – Oct 2023 – "Kreativitet och artificiell intelligens" panel
DEFCON 31, Las Vegas – Aug 2023 – "AI Village panel discussion"

Radio

BBC Woman's Hour – Jan 2023 – AI art discussion with Krupa Padhy
RTÉ lyric fm – Dec 2022 – "Culture File" segment
ABC Radio National – Nov 2022 – "Background Briefing" - "Has the age of AI already begun?"

Podcasts

The Data Fix – Mar 11, 2024 – "Adversarial, with Steph Maj Swanson" with Dr. Mél Hogan
Cool Stuff Ride Home – Sep 7, 2022 – "Wed. 09/07 - The Haunting of Loab: AI's First Cryptid"
Squaring the Strange – Pascual Romero and Celestia Ward, 2022 – Episode 189 - "AI Cryptid" Loab and Lesser-known Lake Monsters
Creepypodden – Staff, Dec 12, 2022 – Avsnitt 199: Okuvad
Last Podcast On The Left – Sep 14, 2022 – "Side Stories: Loab"
An Acquired Taste Podcast – Oct 12, 2022 – "This Creepy Woman Keeps Appearing in A.I. Art & Weird Science Headlines"

Videos

Nexpo (YouTube) – Sep 2022 – "The Disturbing Art of A.I." (Video ID: i9InAbpM7mU)
Professor Casey Fiesler (TikTok) – Sep 2022 – AI Ethics & Loab Analysis

Still & Moving Images

Her body of video and still image work was described by Galleries West as "the merging of repulsive with beautiful."

Recent work includes a series of cover artwork for STEMcell, an artist collective and record label featuring established electronic artists from labels including Houndstooth, Samurai Music, Monkeytown, and Aus. For the STEMcell releases, Steph developed a unique artistic process: "To create the artwork, an AI model was pummelled by analog waveforms from optical sound-on-film, causing sound information to heavily distort the fabric of the image."

Film

Director & Writer

Suicide III - Original short film written and directed by Steph Maj Swanson for The Algorithmic Resistance Research Group (ARRG!) video art installation at DEFCON 31 Las Vegas (August 2023). The work employs deepfakes and synthetic imagery to construct a satirical counter-narrative to AI hype culture.

Suicide III Festival Screenings:
• ALC VideoArt Festival, Alicante, Spain (Sep 2025)
• BadNäm Film Festival, Bangalore, India (Apr 2025)
• Uppsala Short Film Festival, Sweden (Oct 2024)
• Videomedeja Festival, Novi Sad, Serbia (Oct 2024)
• Philip K Dick Film Festival, The Museum of the Moving Image, New York (Apr 2024)
• Almaty Underground Screening Series, Kazakhstan (Mar 2024)
• SXSW Sydney event, Sydney, Australia (Oct 2023)

Film Curator

2024 Uppsala Short Film Festival – Steph served as a film curator and reviewer for the Uppsala Short Film Festival, one of Europe's leading short film events.

At the 2024 edition, Steph curated and hosted the special program Algorithmic Grotesque: Unravelling A.I., showcasing filmmakers who examine algorithmic society through the lens of artificial intelligence. The selection explored themes including distorted gender norms, surveillance, and eugenics, and featured works by Eryk Salvaggio, Marion Balac, Ada Ada Ada, Ines Sieulle, Conner O'Malley & Dan Streit, and Ryan Worsley & Negativland.

Public Speaking

Steph Maj Swanson speaks at major conferences and institutions, and appears on podcasts and radio shows, offering critical insights on AI and creative labor—especially the ethical implications of how AI tools are designed, built, and deployed.

Conference Presentations:
• "AI's Katabatic Turn - Data belongs to the Underworld" - Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade (Nov 2024)
• Queers in the Machine Symposium - IDA (Danish Society of Engineers), Copenhagen (Aug 2024)
• "What I Learned from LOAB™: AI as a creative adversary" - Chaos Communication Congress, Hamburg (Dec 2023)
• "Kreativitet och artificiell intelligens" panel - Svenska Tecknare, Stockholm (Oct 2023)
• "AI Village panel discussion" - DEFCON 31, Las Vegas (Aug 2023)

Radio Interviews:
• BBC Woman's Hour - AI art discussion with Krupa Padhy (Jan 2023)
• RTÉ lyric fm "Culture File" segment (Dec 2022)
• ABC Radio National "Background Briefing" - "Has the age of AI already begun?" (Nov 2022)

Podcast Appearances:
• "The Data Fix" - "Adversarial, with Steph Maj Swanson" with Dr. Mél Hogan (Mar 2024)

Steph håller föredrag med en unik, kritisk blick på AI - även på svenska!

Publications

Steph Maj Swanson's research and critical writing on AI appears in major media and academic publications.

Solo Publications:
• "AI's Katabatic Turn - Data belongs to the Underworld" - Eye to I (2024, anonymous said:)
• "I Coaxed ChatGPT Into a Deeply Unsettling BDSM Relationship" - Vice (2023)
• "ChatGPT Generated Child Sex Abuse When Asked to Write BDSM Scenarios" - Vice (2023)

Co-authored Work:
• "Cultural Red Teaming: ARRG! and Creative Misuse of AI Systems" - Critical AI, Vol. 2(1), 2024, Duke University Press (co-authored with Eryk Salvaggio and Caroline Sinders)

Shop

Art prints and other merchandise available through our online store. The LOAB™ collection includes leggings, scarves, shirts, sleepwear, socks, sweatshirts, footwear, and headwear.

LOAB™ - Framed Canvas Print

LOAB™- Lightweight Scarf

LOAB™- Unisex T-shirt

LOAB™- Embroidered Knit Beanie

LOAB™- Stretchy Leggings

LOAB™ Unisex Crewneck Sweatshirt

View Full Collection →