Training a neural network using images of the opium bird

Opium Bird / Lofaminus / The 2027 Bird — this is an internet meme featuring a series of AI-generated images of a large, anthropomorphic bird. The meme originated in 2023 when a user posted a video containing AI bird images, captioning it as the discovery of a «new species in Antarctica.» Shortly thereafter, the creature was dubbed the Opium Bird, and in the Russian-speaking community, it gained the name Lofaminus. Over time, this evolved into a distinct element of internet folklore: users create theories surrounding the Opium Bird, one of which has become canonical. Lofaminus is presented as a harbinger of certain future events set to come to light in 2027, and the meme itself is referred to as the «Meme from 2027» or the «2027 Bird.»

Since the opium bird is not a single creator or a single object, but rather an established visual canon created by thousands of users, training a LoRA on a collection of such images essentially captures the reproducibility of collective digital art. Moreover, this process is recursive: if a meme becomes understood in 2027, we already have a model capable of generating its variations.