supercomposite. The image of the “creature” designed by AI.
The “accidental” result of an image generated by artificial intelligence (AI), her demonic and swollen face invaded social networks: the artist Supercomposite told the press how her creature, Loab, obsessed her and then exhausted her. Viralized on social networks two years ago, the face that seems to have come out of a horror movie was hailed in international media as a “form of expression that did not exist before,” “disturbing,” which has generated “long ethical and aesthetic conversions.” , art and technology.” It was in April 2022 that those red cheeks and waxy complexion appeared. Supercomposite, real name of Steph Maj Swanson, lives in Sweden and is testing the new possibilities that AI offers. Machine learning tools such as Midjourney, Stable Diffusion or DALL-E have recently made it possible to generate images from a simple written description called a “prompt”. Swanson explores the concept of so-called negative requests, designed to exclude an element from the image.
The 32-year-old artist decided to test AI with a very abstract request. By typing the negative prompt “Brando ::-1”, she asked the tool to produce a result as different as possible from… Marlon Brando. “I basically try to get the opposite of anything,” she explained in an interview with AFP during the Chaos Communication Congress, which brings together hackers from all over the world in Hamburg, Germany every year-end. The opposite of the American actor produced a black logo on which “DIGITA PNTICS” appears in green letters. When he asks again for the opposite of that logo with the prompt “DIGITA PNTICS skyline logo ::-1” the image of a “really sad and disturbing woman with long hair and red cheeks” appears for the first time. If the action is repeated the same result is obtained, then the word Loab appears in truncated letters: the digital creature has a name.
Swanson repeated the exercise, combining Loab with other images created by AI, such as that of a friend generated from the indication “hypercompressed glass tunnel surrounded by angels in the style of Wes Anderson.” Even with different images, says the artist, “I repeated it to myself over and over again. ‘It infected the images’ in the sense that it was difficult to ‘dilute’ it. Sometimes she would reappear after having disappeared (…) That was the most terrifying thing.” Even more disturbing, Loab regularly appeared next to children, sometimes dismembered”, always in a “macabre” and “bloody” world. So much so that Swanson decided to never show some of the 900 images generated. “I became so obsessed that I wanted to see how far I could take the model. She went viral, my life changed,” said the artist. Swanson never wanted to reveal the name of the tool used so as not to “divert attention from the art to that of the makers.” The price of her decision is doubts about the authenticity of her origin. Some Internet users suspect that Loab is a “creepypasta,” an Anglophone term that designates a horror story spread over the Internet, a kind of digital urban legend.
Source: Ambito
I am an author and journalist who has worked in the entertainment industry for over a decade. I currently work as a news editor at a major news website, and my focus is on covering the latest trends in entertainment. I also write occasional pieces for other outlets, and have authored two books about the entertainment industry.
