Supercomposite
Steph Maj Swanson is a multimedia artist based in Uppsala, Sweden.
Steph’s writing was deemed “disturbing” by The Washington Post. Her body of video and still image work was contemplated by Galleries West as “the merging of repulsive with beautiful.”
Steph is best known for her story about the AI-generated character Loab, which The Atlantic dubbed “a form of expression that has never existed before."
Loab is an emergent phenomenon that arises in certain AI image synthesis models. She likely lives in the outer reaches of the latent space, and can be accessed with negatively weighted prompts. Loab is recognized and reproduced by the AI more easily than most celebrities. Even more unsettlingly, using images of Loab to query the model often results in disturbing, gruesome imagery - often of dismembered women and children.
It is not known exactly why Loab has arisen. To learn more about Loab, visit loab.ai or read the original Twitter thread.
"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