In April 2022, artist Steph Maj Swanson asked an AI image generator to produce something as far from Marlon Brando as possible. After a couple of iterations, the system started generating the same woman over and over: an older figure with hollow eyes and triangular patches of rosacea on her cheeks. Swanson named her Loab.

Loab didn't just appear once — it's that she kept appearing. When Swanson combined Loab's image with other pictures and fed them back into the AI, she'd resurface in the results, often in increasingly violent and disturbing contexts. Attempting to dilute her out of the system would work temporarily, but crossbreeding those diluted images would eventually conjure her back.

Swanson theorized that Loab occupies an isolated region of the AI's "latent space" — the mathematic

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