Is AI determined to scare internet users with its digital cryptids?
Some artificial intelligence can generate realistic images from nothing but a text prompt. These tools have been used to illustrate magazine covers and win art competitions, but they can also create some very strange results. Nightmarish images of strange creatures keep popping up, sometimes known as digital cryptids, named after animals that cryptozoologists, but not mainstream scientists, believe may exist somewhere. The phenomenon has garnered national headlines and caused murmuring on social media, so what’s going on?
One Twitter user asked an AI model called DALL-E mini, since renamed Craiyon, to generate images of the word “crungus”. They were surprised by the consistent theme of the outputs: image after image of a snarling, hairy, goat-like man. Next came images of Loab, a woman with dark hair, red cheeks, and absent or disfigured eyes. In a series of images generated by one artist, Loab evolved and cropped up in ever more disturbing scenarios, but remained recognizable. Some people on social media have jokingly suggested that AI is simply revealing the existence of Crungus and Loab and that the consistency of the images is proof they are real beings.
Mhairi Aitken at the Alan Turing Institute in London says nothing could be further from the truth. “Rather than something creepy, what this actually shows are some of the limitations of AI image-generator models,” she says. “Theories about creepy demons are likely to continue to spread via social media and fuel public imagination about the future of AI, while the real explanations may be a bit more boring.”
Comedian Guy Kelly, who generated the original images of Crungus, told New Scientist that he was simply trying to find made-up words that AI could somehow construct a clear image of. “I’d seen people trying existing things in the bot – ‘three dogs riding a seagull’ etc. – but I couldn’t recall seeing anyone using plausible-sounding gibberish,” he says. “I thought it would be fun to plug a nonsense word into the AI bot to see if something that sounded like a concrete thing in my head gave consistent results. I had no idea what a Crungus would look like, just that it sounded a bit ‘goblinny’.”
Although the AI’s influences in creating Crungus will number in the hundreds or thousands, there are a few things that we can point to as likely culprits. There is a range of games that involve a character named Crungus and mentions of the word on Urban Dictionary dating back to 2018 relate to a monster that does “disgusting” things. The word is also not dissimilar to Krampus – a creature said to punish naughty children at Christmas in some parts of Europe – and the appearance of the two creatures is also similar.
What is more important is to make common people and younger internet users understand, that there is no real existence of such creatures, but it is merely a game of probability by AI tools.
The post AI is Creating Digital Cryptids Back to Back! Is It Tech’s Way of Scaring? appeared first on Analytics Insight.
Is AI determined to scare internet users with its digital cryptids?
Some artificial intelligence can generate realistic images from nothing but a text prompt. These tools have been used to illustrate magazine covers and win art competitions, but they can also create some very strange results. Nightmarish images of strange creatures keep popping up, sometimes known as digital cryptids, named after animals that cryptozoologists, but not mainstream scientists, believe may exist somewhere. The phenomenon has garnered national headlines and caused murmuring on social media, so what’s going on?
One Twitter user asked an AI model called DALL-E mini, since renamed Craiyon, to generate images of the word “crungus”. They were surprised by the consistent theme of the outputs: image after image of a snarling, hairy, goat-like man. Next came images of Loab, a woman with dark hair, red cheeks, and absent or disfigured eyes. In a series of images generated by one artist, Loab evolved and cropped up in ever more disturbing scenarios, but remained recognizable. Some people on social media have jokingly suggested that AI is simply revealing the existence of Crungus and Loab and that the consistency of the images is proof they are real beings.
Mhairi Aitken at the Alan Turing Institute in London says nothing could be further from the truth. “Rather than something creepy, what this actually shows are some of the limitations of AI image-generator models,” she says. “Theories about creepy demons are likely to continue to spread via social media and fuel public imagination about the future of AI, while the real explanations may be a bit more boring.”
Comedian Guy Kelly, who generated the original images of Crungus, told New Scientist that he was simply trying to find made-up words that AI could somehow construct a clear image of. “I’d seen people trying existing things in the bot – ‘three dogs riding a seagull’ etc. – but I couldn’t recall seeing anyone using plausible-sounding gibberish,” he says. “I thought it would be fun to plug a nonsense word into the AI bot to see if something that sounded like a concrete thing in my head gave consistent results. I had no idea what a Crungus would look like, just that it sounded a bit ‘goblinny’.”
Although the AI’s influences in creating Crungus will number in the hundreds or thousands, there are a few things that we can point to as likely culprits. There is a range of games that involve a character named Crungus and mentions of the word on Urban Dictionary dating back to 2018 relate to a monster that does “disgusting” things. The word is also not dissimilar to Krampus – a creature said to punish naughty children at Christmas in some parts of Europe – and the appearance of the two creatures is also similar.
What is more important is to make common people and younger internet users understand, that there is no real existence of such creatures, but it is merely a game of probability by AI tools.
The post AI is Creating Digital Cryptids Back to Back! Is It Tech’s Way of Scaring? appeared first on Analytics Insight.