Who is 'LOAB'?

On Sept. 6, the internet was introduced to "Loab," an apparently AI-generated "woman." The internet promptly began calling her "the first cryptid of latent space," "creepy," a "demon" and "a queer icon." There's a lot going on here, so let's explain. First, to understand Loab, you need to understand what's happening in AI art.

Is 'LOAB' a new AI Art?

Since then, iterations of Loab have arrived online in droves. The character is just the latest example in the emerging genre of A.I. art.

What does LOAB mean?

The Atlantic writer Stephen Marche described Loab as a "form of expression that has never existed before" whose authorship is unclear and that exists as an "emanation of the collective imagistic heritage, the unconscious visual mind".

How was LOAB created?

Unlike the internet legends that came before her, Loab wasn’t formed in any single human mind. Instead, she was born in the ‘imagination’ of an AI image generator. “Imagine that the different concepts that the AI ‘knows’ about are drawn on a map, where ideas that are related cluster near to each other,” Supercomposite explains.