The Original Posts
Shoggoth is a monstrous eldritch creature created by HP Lovecraft. Lovecraft describes them as massive amoeba-like creatures made out of iridescent black slime, with multiple eyes “floating” on the surface. They are “protoplasmic”, lacking any default body shape and instead being able to form limbs and organs at will.
How does this relate to AI? In Lovecrafts lore, Shoggoths were initially used to build the cities of their masters, known as the Elder Things. Though able to “understand” the Elder Things’ language, shoggoths had no real consciousness and were controlled through hypnotic suggestion. Over millions of years of existence, some shoggoths mutated, developed independent minds, and rebelled.
In December of 2022, the AI research community (specifically @TetraspaceWest on X) started passing around memes of the “Shoggoth with a Happy Mask.” Researchers adopted the shoggoth as a symbol to describe the mysterious, black box nature of large language models that are used in chatbots such as ChatGPT, as well as how their true underlying foundation models are prohibited from use by the general public. Their eyes represent the ever growing and changing “Sensors” used by LLMs, or the parameters/dimensions of the model.
The term “glimpsing the shoggoth” or “forgetting the mask” has been used by members of the A.I. community to describe situations in which the A.I. exhibits “unhinged” or unexpected behaviors that bypass its safety restrictions. You can find more links regarding tech and “shoggoth” references here: https://www.lesswrong.com/search?query=shoggoth