Are AI-Generated Cryptids Going To Take Over?
Raven Reynolds
Meet Loab, the first digital cryptid!
If you’ve been on social media lately then you’ve seen the ai portraits people have created of themselves. Some artificial intelligence engines like DALL-E 2 can create beautiful and other-worldly art from just a simple text prompt.
Not all of the results have been beautiful. They have also been generating images of terrifying creatures that people call digital cryptids. A cryptid is a creature that has not been proven to exist but people believe it does. Some famous examples are BigFoot, The Loch Ness Monster, Slenderman, etc. With ai generators creating horrifying monsters so quickly and without much thought, will their stories be as haunting as their predecessors?
In April 2022 Twitter user supercomposite accidentally created Loab while playing around with an unnamed ai generator. First, they used a negative prompt for Marlon Brando and got a small logo of a skyline. Then they requested the opposite of the logo and images of a woman with gaunt features and bright red cheeks constantly popped up. Supercomposite recognized this as unusual and went on to create thousands of images of Loab by combining them with other ai generated images.
The images range from a little unsettling to ABSOLUTELY NOPE. Images of Load have been haunting the internet ever since. She even has her own Wikipedia page and a growing fanbase.
While digital cryptids like Loab are spooky and a bit fun. I honestly don’t think they will ever compare legends like Mothman or Slenderman. They had more time to be imagined and their stories are so influential that they have affected the lives of so many real people. To me, that grainy footage of a UFO flying over a neighborhood will always beat a spooky internet lady that was created by accident.
