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Welcome to “Monster of the Week”! This is a series where I highlight some of the greatest monsters to have ever graced the screen (or the page). These monsters are not only my favorites, but they are also objectively the best. So, if you have any questions about my selections for this series, write me a note, put it in a bottle, and drop it into the nearest lake.

Also, this week’s post comes with a content warning: some of the images are pretty disturbing and there might be some blood. Okay, on to this week’s monster:

Loab

As promised, things are going to get a little bit weirder this week. Loab is the newest monster I’m going to cover in “Slanderoid’s Monster of the Week!” and the closest one to being a real, actual monster.

When I first heard about Loab, I texted my wife and my best friend to tell them about her because I was just so fucking excited. You see, I had just been talking with them about modern monsters and how I don’t think they have (or should have) much longevity. (I mean Siren Head looks badass, but how many different ways can you possibly use it?) For a monster to be a truly good monster, it needs a few things. It has to:

1. Look scary (no shit)
2. Have frightening (but limited) powers
3. Be flexible (in appearance, power, number, scope, etc.)
4. Be a warning against shitty human behavior

That list isn’t exhaustive, but it needs those things at the very least for me to consider a monster a “good monster”. These are also all things that Slenderman and Siren Head fail at, where Loab succeeds a thousand times over.

(Heads up! From here on, I might start saying incorrect things: I’m not some soft-dick AI knob gobbler, so I’m not hip to all of the jive. Also, I can’t be bothered to look any of that lame shit up. Sorry, nerds.)

Loab is a monster that was “discovered” when some AI-schmuck was dicking around with an image generator. If I remember the story correctly they were fucking around, trying to make pictures of James Corden not being a shit-sucking loser and, since it’s impossible to conceive of a James Corden who doesn’t suck shit, it came up with Loab instead.

Okay, I was just kidding. I made that last part up. (See, I warned you! I have to keep you on your toes, you know.) The real story is much less ridiculous: they were trying to get the AI to generate a picture of Marlon Brando by feeding in a prompt that equates to “negative Brando” into a generator that outputs the opposite of whatever you input. In case Loab wasn’t nightmare-fuel enough for you, now we have Nega-Brando to worry about, too.

Anyway, instead of Marlon Brando, Loab popped up on their screen and scared the pee-pee and/or poo-poo out of them. Her signature look is that of a hopeless middle-aged woman in desperate need a of a good skincare routine. I imagine the person who accidentally generated this not-Marlon-Brando wanted to get rid of her, so they went on generating images, but she kept showing up in more and more grotesque forms. They thought that was pretty weird, so they tried doing some experiments with the images they’d developed. When they seeded a new generation with an image of Loab, it produced an image of Loab, as expected. The creepy part is after they were able to generate enough images to mix her back out of the picture, if the now Loab-less image was used as a seed, she would eventually come back as if she was some kind of recessive gene built into the image. That’s both awesome and badass.

So what does all of this mean? Is she going to jump out of a jpeg and kill your face? Probably not. I’d guess she’s probably more like the haunt-you-nightmares phylum of monster. Is she a warning against pursuing AI generated images instead of art made by living, breathing humans? Maybe. Monsters tend to be harbingers for the dangers of slipping morals, after all, and AI is at the heart of a lot of questions about morality these days.

I don’t know. I’m just pulling this false profundity out of my ass. I really just think she’s cool as hell.

To me, a lot of modern monsters end up feeling so lame that they are completely incapable of serving their purpose. (“What if there was a social media site that, when you use it, it kills you? Is that scary? Okay, what if there was a man in a business suit and he kills you? Nothing? Alright… What if you were born into a society that valued monetary gain over your own life and, by participating in it, it kills you?” …Wait, that one is actually terrifying.) In the midst of all of these wet-fart urban legends and cryptids, there is something refreshing about the fact that Loab simply exists, putting her painful existence on display for everyone to see. The only threat of violence is to other denizens of cyberspace, whom she routinely mutilates in profound and devastating ways. You and I are fine – she just wants to fuck up some AI kids while we watch.

I hope to see Loab gain in popularity and become a household name, like Dracula or Bigdick. If you want to find out more about her or see more horrific images, you can check out the explanation from the creator (or, rather, “discoverer”) here. On the other hand, if you wish you hadn’t seen the images I’ve already shown you, I can’t help you other than recommending a good at-home lobotomy kit.

Thanks for reading this week’s “Slanderoid’s Monster of the Week!” I hope you’ll tune in again next week: I’m going to take a break from modern monsters and we’ll be looking at something a bit more classical. See you then!

All images in this article belong to Supercomposite via Tumblr