Implausipod ICEbreaker 0001

Welcome back to the work week. It's time for an icebreaker, your Monday morning dose of news and information to help explain the cyberpunk dystopia we're currently living in. I'm your host doctor implausible, and let's get to what's been making news, but first, a quick explanation. When I started envisioning this podcast series, I thought it would be relying mostly on my research into things like innovation and popular culture and the development of emerging technologies.

And I didn't think we'd be hitting on current events too often. You know, we might try and link something to an event that was going on in the world, but not necessarily devote a full episode to it, but like Dr. Ian Malcolm said, life has a funny way, or maybe that was Alanis, but, you know. So thus was born the icebreaker, and here we are with a quick take on something that's popped up in the last week.

In this case, it's the loab that's spelled L O a B. Not sure what that is? I wasn't either until Thursday, when the news started circulating. But as soon as I saw the name, it was pretty instantly recognizable. So I thought I'd cover some of the points about what was missed in the reporting on the story.

And it seems relevant here on the Implausipod, because we briefly touched on some of those background elements in episode three, when we were talking about our introduction to cyberpunk. Well, before we go ahead and explain it, let's lay out the groundwork for what the loab is first. As reported in a number of websites on or around September 8th or ninth, 2022 sites including cnet.com vice.com or slash dot loab is a particular image that keeps showing up across various AI generated art tools like DallE or midjourney.

The fact that it's persistent across multiple platforms and that it's kind of creepy: the image of a young woman who may be a zombie or undead has allowed some people to call it the first ghost in the matrix, or a Demon that's loose within cyberspace. And that might not be entirely wrong. But I don't want to get ahead of ourselves either.

According to the forbes.com article by Paul Tassi on September 7th, 2022, much of the source of this comes from the Twitter user with the handle supercomposite. Basically they were using something called negative option weights when they're typing in their terms into the AI art generator, in order to prompt the creation of an image.

I mean all well and good, not everybody uses the more advanced features of like Google search or YouTube search, but we all kind of get the concept, right? And this image of loab starts showing up whenever those particular terms are entered. And Paul Tassi at Forbes kind of goes into this, that it isn't that a Demonn is being conjured, but there's an image out there of someone or something called loab that the AI generators are drawing on in the creation of this image.

And this has raised a lot of questions. Like where's this coming from? Why is this happening? Is it an actual demon? And this is where the implausipod steps in because as soon as I saw it, it became rather instantly recognizable, at least to me. So let's take our best stab at it. But first, uh, note on the AI art generation, I mean, first off, it's not really AI, it's just a procedural art generation tool.

It uses processes similar to the ones that I used to make D and D campaign maps on my PC 15 years ago, but obviously a lot more advanced and accessible online. Generally they work by taking the prompts, going out into the world and conducting an image, search, grabbing those, and then blending together in rather innovative and clever ways.

Perfectly honest, there's some really cool technology going on behind the scenes in these tools. But let's dial back the rhetoric on AI a little bit here and turning our eyes to the mystery in cyberspace, which is of course, like catnip here on this channel. I mean, given that the academic work that I did for my ma thesis is all about the, you know, science fiction pre-history of the construction of virtual reality, you know, it's kind of in our wheelhouse here.

So let's talk a little bit about LOA B and the 36 year old history of voodoo and the matrix. Yeah. LOA B. I don't think it's loab at all and the rest of this makes a lot more sense if it's just a version of LOA so if we head over to Dr. Implausible's bookshelf, on it we'll find from 1986, William Gibson's Count Zero, the second novel in the sprawl trilogy.

This is one of his earlier works. And as the sprawl trilogy was kind of foundational to the whole cyberpunk genre, I thought it might have been more widely recognized, but regardless, I think this is the source. In the novel on page 114, or at least that's the page in my dog-eared copy of the paperback. We find one of the Rastafarian hackers, Lucas explaining things to Bobby Newmark.

If you need a visual, just think Morpheus explaining the matrix to Neo and you're pretty much there, note for note. Lucas goes on to say to Bobby Newmark. "No, nevermind the metaphor. Then when Beauvoir or I talked to you about the loa and their horses, as we call those who the loa choose to ride. You should pretend that we are talking two languages at once.

So basically in the sprawl universe, after the AIs were released into the matrix at the end of Neuromancer, things started to get weird and deals had to be made with the entities that now resided in cyberspace in order to get things done. And so for the practitioners of vodoun those entities or AI fragments manifested as the various LOA or spirits.

So like Baron Samedi or his wife, Maman Brigit now I'm not a practitioner of vodoun and I'm probably mangling the pronunciations. So if I am my sincere apologies, but continuing: Baron Samedi is the loa of the dead, right? And if we do an image search on Baron Samedi, or loa + cyberspace as our terms. Well, just give it a try yourself.

You'll see him in his visage with a skull face and a top hat and there might be some references to the James Bond movie Live and Let Die. And if we compare that with like a Pinterest search for cyber punk and LOA, you're gonna get a lot of images of females with swords and other various hacker. So if your standard procedural art generation tool is out in the world, grabbing these kinds of images for a search on LOA, this is what it's gonna find: super composites of skulls and ladies. Fun stuff. 

Now, why are those images showing up when people input in terms with negative prompt weights? Well, it's hard to say maybe it's a joke by the creators of the AI program. So if someone hits LOA, that's what pops. Maybe the programs are using similar code bases.

So that ends up getting shared and propagated throughout them. Maybe it's something else: who knows? It's hard to say. I'm sure the truth will come out, but the internet is a wonderful place. Just be careful what you type in when you're entering a search term or you might end up summoning a Demon. Ooh, scary kiddies.

Thanks again for joining me for the first Implausipod icebreaker. I'm your host doctor implausible. You can reach me at drimplausible@implausi.blog, and I'll try and put up a link to the transcript as well as various show notes when we post this on Monday morning. Thanks again. See you again soon in our dystopian present.