AI artist, considered a pioneer, claims that the technology is ultimately restrictive and has caused her to feel exhausted.
Supercomposite, a Swedish artist and writer, who gained attention for her eerie AI-generated female portrait, has decided to take a break from the technology. Expressing her frustration and limitations with AI art, she has temporarily halted her work with it and is currently focusing on writing a screenplay. The artist admitted feeling burnt out after her experience with AI art.
“It creates this dopamine pathway in your brain. It’s very addictive to keep pushing the button and getting these results,” he said.
The supercomposite created a red-pocked, hollow-eyed woman named “Loab” in the year 2022 while testing new artistic possibilities offered by artificial intelligence.
His social media posts about Loab’s creation and his creative process went viral, with commentators describing the images as “disturbing” and saying they had “sparked long ethical debates about visual aesthetics, art and technology”.
Tools such as Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, and DALL-E have made it possible to create images from written prompts.
The supercomposite – whose real name is Steph Maj Swanson and is originally from the United States – had been researching so-called “negative prompts” to exclude certain elements from an image.
– “It was the scariest” –
He wrote the negative prompt “Brando::-1” and asked one tool to come up with something as far removed from the late American actor Marlon Brando as possible.
At first, a black logo appeared with green letters that read “DIGITA PNTICS,” the 32-year-old told AFP in an interview at the Chaos Communication Congress, which gathers hackers every year in late December in Hamburg.
But when the artist requested the opposite again with the query “DIGITA PNTICS” silhouette logo::-1, the image of “this really sad, haunted-looking woman with long hair and red cheeks” appeared for the first time, he said.
The text “Loab” appeared in truncated letters in one of the images – naming the creature that looked like it was straight out of a horror movie.
Swanson then tried to get the AI to transform Loab with another request. And to that newly created image he made another request and another. But a strange trend appeared.
“Sometimes he would reappear after he had disappeared for a few generations. That was the scariest thing,” he said.
More disturbingly, Loab regularly appeared alongside children, “sometimes in pieces” and always in a “macabre” and “gory” world, he said.
Swanson chose not to show what he considered the most shocking of the hundreds of images created, including Loab’s.
– “My life changed” –
Loab’s existence was first revealed in September 2022 on Twitter, whose name has been changed to X.
“It went viral, my life changed,” she said, explaining how she became “so obsessed” with Loab.
“I wanted to explore who he was, the different scenarios he appears in and his limits, to see how far I could push the model.”
The reasons for the character’s recurring appearance are unclear. Experts have pointed out that it is impossible to know how generative AI will interpret abstract requests.
Swanson hasn’t revealed what tool he used to create the Loab because he wanted to avoid “shifting the focus away from the art to the designers” and “marketing,” he said.
But his refusal to name Loab’s creator has led to doubts about how he was created, with some internet users suspecting Swanson retouched the images to create so-called “creepypasta” – a type of digital horror theme cooked up to haunt. social networks.
Swanson denied dreaming or manually transforming Loab, saying he took the claims as a compliment: “It meant people were interacting with it.”
But it’s been more than a year since Swanson touched down with Loab, saying the whole incident left him exhausted and burned out. He has stopped creating AI images to devote himself to the script.
He summed up his current opinion of such tools with a quote from Nam June Paik, a native South Korean video art pioneer: “I use technology to hate it properly.”
