Why do AIs keep creating nightmarish images of strange characters?

Artificial intelligences can create realistic images. The tools have been used to illustrate magazine covers and win art contests, but they can also create very strange results. Digital cryptids, also known as nightmarish images of strange creatures, are named after animals that cryptologists but not main steam scientists believe may exist somewhere. The phenomenon has caused a lot of chatter on social media.

What images are being generated?

An artificial intelligence model called DALL-E mini was asked by a user to create images of the word "craiyon" The consistent theme of the outputs was a snarling, hairy, goat-like man.

There were pictures of a woman with dark hair and red cheeks. In a series of increasingly disturbing images generated by one artist, loab evolved and popped up in even more disturbing scenarios, but remained recognizable.

Are these characters discovered, invented or copied?

There are people on social media who think that the consistency of the images is proof that the people are real.

Mhairi says nothing could be further from the truth. She says that what this actually shows is some of the limitations of artificial intelligence. Theories about demonic beings are likely to be spread via social media and fuel public imagination about the future of artificial intelligence.

The vast amount of text, photographs and other data created by humans is the source of the images.

Where did Crungus come from?

Guy Kelly told New Scientist that he was just trying to find words that an artificial intelligence could create a clear image of.

I had seen people try existing things in the bot, but I couldn't remember seeing anyone use gibberish. To see if something that sounded like a concrete thing in my head gave consistent results, I wanted to plug a nonsense word into the artificial intelligence bot. I had no idea what a C rungus looked like.

There are a few things that we can point to as likely culprits in the creation of crungus. A monster that does "disgusting" things is the subject of a range of games that involve a character named crungus. The appearance of the two creatures is similar, and the word is also not different to Krampus.

Mark Lee, a professor at the University of Birmingham, UK, says that the data that has been seen is not a true representation of what is actually happening. He thinks it's producing things which are original. They are not new examples. It is possible that it is a blend of multiple sources. It looks very frightening.

Where did Loab come from?

The fictional beast is called loab. The artist Supercomposite told New Scientist that he spent a lot of time looking at the outputs of an unnamed artificial intelligence for quirky results.

They say that it shows a lot about what accidents are happening inside neural networks. The data set is based on images people have created and how people have decided to collect it. It seems like a ghost in the machine, but it really reflects our culture.

In order to create an image that is conceptually as far away from the input as possible, loab was created with a negative weighted prompt. Negative inputs can cause unpredictable results.

The artificial intelligence was asked to make a logo that was different from the one given by "Brando". They were given a series of pictures of loab after asking for the opposite.

The text prompt usually leads to a wide set of outputs. The resulting images are more constrained when a negative prompt is used. One theory is that negative prompt could be more likely to repeat certain images or aspects of them.

What does this say about public understanding of AI?

Even though we rely on artificial intelligence for a lot of things, not even the researchers developing them understand how it works. It's because we don't know how they do things. The rest of the system is a black box.

She says that artificial intelligence is discussed as though it is a mystery. It is likely that this is the first of many examples which will give birth to conspiracy theories about characters living in cyberspace. It is important that we address the misunderstandings and misconception about Artificial Intelligence so that people understand that it is simply computer programs that do what they are programmed to do.

Lee thinks that these urban legends are born. Children and other people take these matters seriously. We need to be very careful when we say that it is not supernatural.