Can AI Detect Ghosts?
Meet Loab, the world’s first digital cryptid. Loab, a female, looks like she’s had a rough day. Her face is splotched by the redness of rosacea, her eyes shrunken back into her head. She mostly grimaces, but even when she is smiling, the effect is unnerving.
But no wonder Loab is unhappy: She doesn’t exist. At least not in any corporeal form, in our own dimension. But she shows up quite a bit in machine learning modeling. Loab was given her name by a Swedish artificial intelligence (AI) artist who goes under the nom de plume “Supercomposite.” Loab is purely the product of what the AI industry calls “negative prompt weights,” or instructions for AI modeling software to make an image look as different as possible from some other image.
Using one of the many popular programs today that create images from text prompts, Supercomposite asked for "Brando::-1" (after actor Marlon Brando) which resulted in a nonsensical logo. Then Supercomposite asked for the opposite of the Brando logo, and four strikingly similar photos of a ghostly woman emerged.
And this is not the only place her likeness has shown up. “The AI reproduced her more easily than most celebrities. Her presence is persistent, and she haunts every image she touches,” Supercomposite wrote in a Tweet. “Through some kind of emergent statistical accident, something about this woman is adjacent to extremely gory and macabre imagery in the distribution of the AI's world knowledge.”
In fact, the images are so frightful, the Twitter algorithm itself tagged them as “violence and sensitive content” even though they are entirely fabricated (to be fair, some of the images are genuinely disturbing).
But before we start believing that Loab is a wayward specter soaking through other dimensions, Matthew Skala, founder of North Coast Synthesis Ltd., offered a more rational explanation on Twitter. He wrote that “Yes the pictures are freaky but the phenomenon is not really as surprising as it may first seem. When you think of it in high-dimensional geometric terms it's understandable why there would be some image that tends to soak up negative-prompt queries.”
It was computer pioneer Alan Turing himself who first devised a mathematical formula for why we keep seeing reoccurring patterns in nature and in our own hallucinations — later called Turing Patterns — such as Lattices, funnels, spirals and cobwebs. So perhaps we are seeing in Loab a reoccurring pattern generated by AI.
This is not the first time people have witnessed ghosts in the machine. We remember from a few decades back, “electronic voice phenomena” in which people claimed to hear voices from the deceased buried in electronic signals, such as radio or television white noise. The idea was that those lost in the underworld could only communicate by encoding their voices on an electronic signal. Examples of EVP were spooky as well, though they can all be easily attributed to signal leakage across the electromagnetic waves.
For now, we’ll conclude Loab is also an unhappy byproduct of overly-bulky statistical algorithms, rather than some demon trying to sneak into our AI models. But we still look forward to all the shlocky movies around computer-conjured ghosts that manifest our collective anxiety around AI run amuck.
In the meantime, please do bookmark our machine learning topic hub for more stories about how AI can be used to generate frightfully useful results. Bwa-hahaha.
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