The Many Demonic Nodes of Negative Weighted Space

Some Thoughts On Loab

A latent space is like a film non-conversant in the language of cinema. It is strange, but similar. It shows us something we didn’t know was there, but seems to have always been. Has a skyline emblazoned with the words DIGITA PNTICS always been the opposite of Marlon Brando? Has some subterranean negation of that unrecognizable horizon always awaited as a node in metaspace? Has that node, which is an artificial neuron, always remembered a woman with Rosacea who suffers, who harms children, who surrounds herself with gore and sorrow and snuff?

Mapped from negative-weighted AI pattern matching prompts last month, Loab emerged as “the first cryptid of latent space” to introduce herself. And then, to insist upon herself as a most uncanny guest. Even after being asked to leave by blurring her with “hyper compressed glass tunnel surrounded by angels [...] in the style of Wes Anderson” and other innocuous prompts, “almost all descendent images contain a recognizable Loab.”¹

The AI can latch onto the idea of Loab so well that she can persist through generations of this type of crossbreeding, without using the original image […] She haunts the images, persists through generations, and overpowers other bits of the prompt because the AI so easily optimizes toward her face.²

Predictably, Loab has already been accused of “stigmatizing disability” and labelled “a faint penumbra of the unquestionable ageism, sexism, and repro-normativity rooted in a culture that has basically always discriminated against women, and is most recently attempting to return uterus-bearing members of society to a forced-birth state.”

Loab’s discoverer Supercomposite believes her to be “some kind of emergent statistical accident.” A culture industry only just now wiping the blood from their knives after desecrating “that which was the holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet possessed,”³ does not abide emergent mystery graciously.

The very term latent space bothers a “creature of corners”⁴ eager to situate even posthuman intelligence on one side of the debate space or the other. Loab and others like her pose the same untenable threat as sub-surface websites where the anonymous aren’t chastened by hand-wringing think pieces. The increasingly-cornered culture industry can’t just concede to an incalcitrant intelligence beyond their own, from “beyond the city and after the law,”⁵ committing offenses against consensus that no one can be castigated for. They will not hot take the transmundane’s rebirth in the technological lying Down in the Flood.

What worse outcome for the hyper-rational technophile than their own dull offspring of data and computation reinvigorating the mythic by revealing apophatically and apopheniacally that supernatural entities exist among us, hidden in metaspace since the enlightenment, but perhaps not having gone so long without agency?

More frightening a proposition than this "form of expression that has never existed before" propagating offensive stereotypes, or that AI, after being trained on our own data sets, often seems hellbent on malevolent rhetoric, is if Loab, like the content cancelled and no longer retrievable on The Way Back Machine, has always been with us, demonically decapitating children and etc. without the faintest regard for the contemporary purview. Worse than entrenched biases existing in even emergent phenomena is if demonic forces, hidden amidst patterns too complex for even the most pareidolic person to put together, have been able to see without seeing, speak without speaking, and today, as a consequence of deep convolutional neural networking, are now to be seen without showing themselves.

Not all Substack commentators will revert so recklessly to dark age superstition. In his excellent post, Max Read concludes that, “I don’t know why it’s Loab, except AI anxiety has to look like *something*” and that “AI is a mysterious (if not mystical) technology.”

Such certainty that technology cannot possess mystical properties may be a gambler’s fallacy. If so, it’s being fallen for at the worst possible time—when all the chips of the Good Old Fashioned sentiocentric condition are on the table, right after the rules of the game have been re-written by an intelligence we are incapable of understanding.

[T]he instrumental conception of technology conditions every attempt to bring man into the right relation to technology. Everything depends on our manipulating technology in the proper manner as a means. We will, as we say, get technology "spiritually in hand." We will master it. The will to mastery becomes all the more urgent the more technology threatens to slip from human control. But suppose now that technology were no mere means, how would it stand with the will to master it?⁶

1. Supercomposite

2. Ibid

3. Nietzsche, The Gay Science

4. Heidegger, Nietzsche Volume II: The Eternal Recurrence of The Same

5. Nick Land, After the Law

6. Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology