crungus amongus

Cryptid mining in latent space

“Crungus” may sound familiar, like something from a fairy tale or half-forgotten children's movie, but the word was originally meaningless by design. It was coined in June 2022 by Guy Kelly, who found that entering “crungus” into the DALL·E mini image generator produced reliably monstrous results: some kind of ogrish creature, clawed, horned and hairy, like an orc from The Lord of the Rings.

Kelly's experiment was widely replicated, and the crungus became famous as the first cryptid of latent space. Today, the term continues to generate monstrous imagery across AI models. For this project, we had 122 different models on Replicate produce 100 different images of the crungus for each of the prompts “crungus” and “a picture of a crungus”, without any style instructions or fixed seeds.

The resulting menagerie reflects the many and varied shades of modern monstrousness, spanning the medieval and the alien, the creepy and the kawaii, the malevolent and the misunderstood.

Browse 24,400 images from 122 models, explore the atlas, or use the eigencrungi sliders to examine variation. About the research and collection method.

Years identify model releases; all outputs were generated for this project. The strip below selects one image per release year by its average similarity to the others in that group.

  1. representative output from a model released in 2021, by pixray/text2image 2021
  2. representative output from a model released in 2022, by borisdayma/dalle-mini 2022
  3. representative output from a model released in 2023, by ai-forever/kandinsky-2 2023
  4. representative output from a model released in 2024, by sdxl-based/realvisxl-v3-multi-controlnet-lora 2024
  5. representative output from a model released in 2025, by black-forest-labs/flux-dev 2025
  6. representative output from a model released in 2026, by xai/grok-imagine-image-2 2026

The archive

2021

2022

2023

2024

2025

2026

The sound of crungus

The audio collection uses “crungus” and “the sound of a crungus”: 310 clips from 16 models, in the sound archive, or shuffled end to end on crungus radio.

The eigencrungi

Explore variation in the archive through pixel and CLIP feature sliders: the eigencrungi.