A Crungus is an imaginary creature found in an AI

text-to-image model A text-to-image model is a machine learning model which takes as input a natural language description and produces an image matching that description. Such models began to be developed in the mid-2010s, as a result of advances in deep neural netwo ...

, sometimes also referred to as a digital

cryptid Cryptids are animals that cryptozoologists believe may exist somewhere in the wild, but are not believed to exist by mainstream science. Cryptozoology is a pseudoscience, which primarily looks at anecdotal stories, and other claims rejected by ...

. Twitch streamer and voice actor Guy Kelly found that typing the made-up word into the

Craiyon DALL-E (stylized as DALL·E) and DALL-E 2 are deep learning models developed by OpenAI to generate digital images from natural language descriptions, called "prompts". DALL-E was revealed by OpenAI in a blog post in January 2021, and uses a v ...

image generator consistently produced pictures of a monstrous, hairy humanoid. He later tweeted about this which resulted in a very long thread of reactions and experiments with "Crungus" and variations of this AI-prompt also on different engines.

Origins

It is unclear how the Crungus in Craiyon's output came into existence. Kelly thinks an error in the AI software models is the most likely explanation. In any case, the Krampus was quickly eliminated as a model. Although the horned mythical figure from the

Alpine region The main valleys of the Alps, orographically by drainage basin. Rhine basin (North Sea) High Rhine *Aare ** Limmat ***Linth (Glarus) ****Lake Walen *****Seeztal **** Klöntal ****Sernftal ** Reuss ***Lake Lucerne ****Sarner Aa (Brünig Pass co ...

has a similar name and his mask looks almost exactly the same, the term "Krampus" on Craiyon provides different images. Kelly also speculated at the AI was responding to the "-rungus" suffix, noting the similar appearance of heavy metal performer

Oderus Urungus David Murray Brockie (August 30, 1963 – March 23, 2014) was a Canadian-American musician, who was the lead vocalist of the heavy metal band Gwar, in which he performed as Oderus Urungus. He performed as a bassist and lead singer in the b ...

, and could be interpreting the word as something " orc-based", in reference to the fantasy creatures.

References

{{reflist Artificial intelligence art Text-to-image generation Fictional characters introduced in 2022

Origins

See also

References