Loab

How Loab was discovered

Loab is the name artist Steph Maj Swanson, known online as Supercomposite, gave to a recurring woman she found while experimenting with an image model in April 2022.

The route to her was indirect. Supercomposite used the negatively weighted prompt Brando::-1, asking the model to move away from the concept rather than toward it. The result resembled a skyline logo with garbled text: “DIGITA PNTICS.” She then negatively weighted a description of that image. Instead of returning toward Marlon Brando, the model produced several versions of the same tired-looking, red-cheeked woman. Text resembling “LOAB” appeared in one image, and the name stuck.

Why did she keep coming back?

Supercomposite kept combining Loab images with other pictures. The settings and details changed, sometimes becoming violent or grotesque, but recognizable versions of the woman often remained.

That persistence made the experiment feel less like inventing a character and more like repeatedly finding one that was already there.

Loab is back in the output again. The latent-space cryptid refuses to leave.

Example written for this dictionary.

Was Loab really “inside” the AI?

There is no evidence that Loab was a hidden conscious character or that she was literally haunting a model. Image generators learn dense networks of visual associations from training data; unusual prompt operations can lead into regions that produce surprisingly stable patterns.

How Loab became an AI cryptid

The technical explanation did not kill the story. In 2022, image generation was still unfamiliar to many people, and Loab gave the technology something its polished demonstrations lacked: a ghost story. Like the shoggoth, she became memorable because an abstract system was turned into a character people could recognize and retell.

Supercomposite shared the experiment in a long Twitter thread on September 6, 2022. The account described discovering Loab months earlier and documented how the face persisted through generations of image combinations.

Soon afterward, another user called her “the first cryptid of the latent space.” It was never a technical category. It was internet folklore — which is precisely why the description lasted.

Source & further reading

Supercomposite's original Loab thread

Smithsonian Magazine: Who Is the Woman Haunting A.I.-Generated Art?