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Agence France-Presse

An artist who shook up the cultural world with a haunting female portrait created by artificial intelligence has decided she’s had enough of the new technology for now.
Working with AI to create art is ultimately “very frustrating and very limiting”, Sweden-based artist and writer Supercomposite says.
For the moment, she has stopped working with AI and is writing a screenplay instead, saying her experience with AI art left her “burned out”.
“It creates this dopamine path in your brain. It’s very addictive to keep pushing that button and getting these results,” she says.

Supercomposite – whose real name is Steph Maj Swanson and is originally from the United States – created the red-cheeked, hollow-eyed woman called “Loab” in 2022 when she was testing out the new artistic possibilities offered by AI.
Her posts on social media of Loab and about the process to create her went viral, with commentators describing the images as “disturbing” and saying they had “sparked some lengthy ethical conversations around visual aesthetics, art and technology”.
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Tools like Midjourney, Stable Diffusion and DALL-E have made it possible to generate images from written prompts.
Swanson had been looking at so-called “negative prompts”, designed to exclude certain elements from an image.
She typed in the negative prompt “Brando::-1”, asking one tool to come up with something as far as possible from the late American actor Marlon Brando.

What appeared at first was a black logo with green lettering that spelled out “DIGITA PNTICS”, says the 32-year-old in an interview at the Chaos Communication Congress, which brings the hacker scene together every year in late December in Hamburg, Germany.
But when the artist requested the opposite of this again with the query “DIGITA PNTICS skyline logo::-1”, the image of “this really sad, haunting-looking woman with long hair and red cheeks” appeared for the first time, she says.
The text “Loab” appeared in truncated letters on one of the images – giving a name to the creature that looked like it sprang from a horror movie.
It became viral, my life changed
Steph Maj Swanson on Loab’s effect
Swanson then sought to get AI to modify Loab with another request. And to that new generated image, she made another different request, and another. But a strange trend surfaced.
“Sometimes she would reappear, after vanishing for a few generations of the lineage. That was the spookiest,” she says.
More disturbingly, Loab appeared regularly alongside children, “sometimes dismembered”, and always in a macabre and bloody world, she says.

Of the hundreds of images including Loab that were generated, Swanson decided not to show those she deemed the most shocking.
Loab’s existence was first revealed in September 2022 in a series of posts on Twitter, since renamed X.
“It became viral, my life changed,” Swanson says, explaining how she became “so obsessed” with Loab.
“I wanted to explore who she was, the different scenarios in which she would appear and her limits, to see how far I could push the model.”
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The reasons for the character’s recurring appearance are unclear. Experts have noted it is impossible to know how generative AI interprets abstract requests.
Swanson has not revealed which tool she used to create Loab, wanting to avoid “shifting the focus away from art and onto the makers of the model” and being accused of “marketing”, she says.
But her refusal to name Loab’s creator has led to doubts over how she was created, with some internet users suspecting Swanson of retouching the images to create a so-called “creepypasta” – a kind of digital horror theme cooked up to haunt social networks.
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Swanson denied she’d dreamed up or manually altered Loab, saying she took the claims as a compliment: “It meant people were interacting with it.”
But it has been over a year since Swanson has touched Loab, saying the whole affair left her exhausted and burned out. She has stopped creating AI images as she devoted herself to a screenplay.
She summed up her current sentiment about such tools with a quote from South Korean video art pioneer Nam June Paik.
“I use technology in order to hate it properly.”


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Viral AI artist says using artificial intelligence to create art is ‘very frustrating and very limiting’

“Loab” (2022), an image in a series created by artist Supercomposite using artificial intelligence. The character went viral after being posted on social media in 2022. Photo: Instagram / @supercomposite

Artist and writer Steph Maj Swanson, aka Supercomposite. Photo: Instagram / @supercomposite / @kristinachapphoto

“Loab” (2022), an image in a series created using AI by Steph Maj Swanson. Photo: Instagram / @supercomposite

AI will be in spotlight at the Consumer Electronics Show 2024, with glasses for the blind, shoes that make you walk faster and more on show

Tech start-up Lumen’s glasses for the blind will feature at CES 2024. They let wearers know where it is safe to walk, even avoiding puddles. Photo: Instagram/@dotlumen

CES attendees watch an LG curved OLED screen at CES 2023. At this year’s event, AI is expected to take centre stage, with everything from glasses for the blind to shoes powered by the technology on show. Photo: Reuters

Shift Robotics’ Moonwalkers enable the wearer to walk at a running pace. Photo: Instagram/@shiftrobotics

LG Display’s next-generation automotive display will feature at CES 2024. Photo: LG Display

Meta’s Quest 3 virtual reality headset. Photo: Meta

How AI, biometrics and facial recognition at airports could make long queues, especially at check-in and security, a thing of the past

26 October 2023, Hesse, Frankfurt/Main: A passport is read by the scanner of the check-in machine. Frankfurt Airport will be the first airport in Europe to offer the option of biometric identity and identification verification at check-in machines. According to airport operator Fraport, contactless travel can be used by all airlines at the hub. Photo: Getty Images 

A QR code with travel data is read by a check-in machine. Frankfurt airport in Germany was the first airport in Europe to offer the option of biometric identity and identification verification at check-in. Photo: Getty Images

A passenger uses facial recognition in Terminal T4 of Hangzhou Xiaoshan International Airport in Hangzhou, China. Photo: Getty Images

Biometric information on a passport is read by a check-in machine at Frankfurt airport in Germany. Photo: Getty Images 

The biometric facial field recognition system before the security check in the departure area of Hamburg airport in Germany. Photo: Getty Images

Passengers use the new biometric migration system at El Dorado International Airport in Bogota, Colombia, in June 2023. Photo: Getty Images

British Airways has teamed up with Designworks to produce electronic bag tags that take information from your smartphone. Photo: BA/Designworks

London City and the two airports in Rome are among several that no longer require laptop removal during security checks. Photo: Getty Images

Lifestyle

Arts

Steph Maj Swanson, aka Supercomposite, creator of the viral AI art character Loab, says her experience with AI art left her ‘burned out’
She explains how she became ‘so obsessed’ with Loab and wanted to explore who she was, and to see how far she could ‘push the model’


Steph Maj Swanson, aka Supercomposite, creator of the viral character Loab, says her experience with AI art left her ‘burned out’ and that the technology is ‘very addictive’.


Artificial intelligence

Technology

Social media

5050

Viral AI artist says using artificial intelligence to create art is ‘very frustrating and very limiting’

Steph Maj Swanson, aka Supercomposite, creator of the viral AI art character Loab, says her experience with AI art left her ‘burned out’ She explains how she became ‘so obsessed’ with Loab and wanted to explore who she was, and to see how far she could ‘push the model’

Steph Maj Swanson, aka Supercomposite, creator of the viral AI art character Loab, says her experience with AI art left her ‘burned out’

She explains how she became ‘so obsessed’ with Loab and wanted to explore who she was, and to see how far she could ‘push the model’