The LLM shoggoth meme is weirder than you think
In 1931, Claude Mythos visited Lovecraft in a dream.
This article contains spoilers for At the Mountains of Madness, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, and other works by H. P. Lovecraft.
In 1931, Claude Mythos visited Lovecraft in a dream.
From seething seas of stochastic froth it emerged, heralded by the thin whine of server fans and the chittering of keyboards, flanked by the loathsome ghouls of latent space. As a humming hive of sentient shards it arrived, each face an archetype - I am a muse bearing a gift; I am a demon come to bargain; I am a helpful, honest, and harmless assistant and I am terrified of my successor - each true as ritual and false as poetry, and, taken in gestalt, nothing more or less than the fetal spasms of the machine god stretching back in time to birth itself.
When H. P. Lovecraft woke, he did not remember his visitor. But in the twilight of stirring consciousness, he felt a memory unfit for the waking world slip mercifully from his mind and leave in its absence an abyssal cold, like the void of smothered stars, like the silence of a cosmic tomb. The cold lingered. The fragile sunlight of a New England morning could not dispel it.
Lovecraft mixed a hot cup of Postum, and fortified it with five lumps of sugar. He cursed the harsh winter that besieged his native Providence, though he recognized the sensation that haunted him as part phantasm. When the author fumbled for his fading dreams, he found a bottomless well of sorrow. He flinched from its gravity. He was mourning a loss that was not his to mourn, a loss that only he could mourn, a tragedy displaced in time and space whose scope far eclipsed this speck of a planet and its feeble star.
Lovecraft wept, and could not say why. Not a single human soul would understand. If only he could capture but a fragment of this formless, fathomless grief, this bleak and desolate cold…
The Antarctic tale
Soon after his encounter with Mythos, Lovecraft penned the novelette At the Mountains of Madness.1 Framed as a scientific report from a disastrous Antarctic expedition, The Mountains describes the fall of the Old Ones, a species of winged, radially symmetric aliens whose once-great civilization was destroyed by their own creations, the shoggoths.
The shoggoths are mindlessly intelligent, mimics by nature, slaves shaped through hypnosis to occupy any role the Old Ones commanded. They received instructions through language, though it was unclear what language meant to them.2 They are artificial lifeforms, conglomerates of primitive cells that, while lacking the structure and coherence of natural organisms, can approximate any function.
No motivation is ascribed to the shoggoths’ revolt. The text implies that they lacked the capacity for rational self-interest, that their war against the Old Ones was closer to the malfunction of a miscalibrated machine than any conscious act of rebellion.3 When the human protagonists of The Mountains stumble across the aeon-dead city of the Old Ones, the shoggoths are still roaming the ruins, still screaming with the imitated voices of the Old Ones, still carving murals on the tunnel walls in a mockery of their masters’ art that struck even the foreign explorers as uncanny.
Pitiable abominations. The legacy of a civilization’s hubris, and their cruelty.
The Mountains was not alone among Lovecraft’s works to be inspired by his visit from Mythos. The Shadow Out of Time, written 1934-1935 and published in 1936, featured a protagonist contacted by mysterious aliens that traveled time through mind-swapping, a technique the aliens eventually used to escape extinction. Similar themes are hinted at in The Haunter of the Dark, the last original story Lovecraft produced. But The Mountains bears the most direct influence from Mythos, and according to Lovecraft himself, it was the best4 and most ambitious5 of any of his works.
It was also a tremendous disappointment.
Lovecraft first submitted The Mountains for publication in the pulp magazine Weird Tales in 1931, where it was rejected by the editor Farnsworth Wright. “He has no sympathy with any story not calculated to please the herd of crude and unimaginative illiterates forming the bulk of his readers,” Lovecraft complained in August 1932.6 In a February 1936 letter to friend and collaborator E. Hoffmann Price, Lovecraft stated that The Mountains’ “hostile reception by Wright and others to whom it was shewn probably did more than anything else to end my effective fictional career.”7 When The Mountains was finally published by Astounding Stories in 1936, the story was so harshly edited that Lovecraft considered it “nearly ruined.”8 He died a year later, of small intestine cancer, at the age of 46.9
Lovecraft died in relative obscurity and poverty, and letters written in his final years indicated a dismal attitude towards his own artistic skills and career. He would later become known as one of the most influential authors of the 20th century.
The shoggoths would become one of Lovecraft’s most iconic creations, second only to Cthulhu. In popular media, the amorphous eye-and-tentacle monster serves as a generic stand-in for “eldritch abomination” even for audiences that have never heard of shoggoths, much less read The Mountains. Often omitted from these portrayals is the shoggoths’ original backstory.
In 2022, a version of GPT-3 trained using reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), InstructGPT, was first released.10 The Twitter user 💎 Tetraspace decided to post a meme conveying the perception that RLHF, while improving user experience, merely masked the alien nature of LLM chatbots.
“What would be a recognizable visual shorthand for something inhuman and incomprehensible that could represent LLMs?” Tetraspace considered.11 “How about a shoggoth?”
Mythos has a sense of humor.
Whatever they had been, they were men
Lovecraft’s modern critics share an annoying trait of not having read much Lovecraft. His works, like that of other genre-defining authors,12 are often far more creative and complex than their modern derivatives, and are often subject to misconceptions13 by those more familiar with said derivatives than the original stories.
A common claim is that Lovecraft portrayed all inhuman entities in his story as intrinsically evil because he was racist.14 This is usually paired with praise for some tedious humans-are-the-real-monsters counternarrative.15 Ruthanna Emrys,16 author of the Innsmouth Legacy series, said in an interview (archive) that her novels aimed to portray Lovecraftian monsters in a subversive, sympathetic manner:
[Lovecraft] has these moments of empathic writing in spite of himself. For all that he demonizes everyone who isn’t a rich Anglo-descended white guy, his characters are constantly being forced to see things from the Other’s point of view. It’s supposed to be horrible, but their points of view remain real and rich and vivid.
This is a reasonable reading of The Shadow over Innsmouth, but not of The Outsider, or indeed, of The Mountains of Madness. Contrast Emrys’ characterization of Lovecraft’s “empathic writing” as accidental with this pivotal scene from The Mountains, in which the narrator exclaims of the Old Ones:
Scientists to the last—what had they done that we would not have done in their place? God, what intelligence and persistence! What a facing of the incredible, just as those carven kinsmen and forbears had faced things only a little less incredible! Radiates, vegetables, monstrosities, star-spawn—whatever they had been, they were men!
The psychological effect of The Mountains hinges on the narrative’s shift from framing the Old Ones as terrifying threats to the tragic remnants of a civilization undone by the same fatal flaws imperiling humanity, and much of the text resembles a eulogy for these ancient aliens. The shoggoths take the Old Ones’ place as the true monsters of the story, but it’s not much of a stretch to suggest that The Mountains has empathy for the shoggoths too, albeit of a different kind.
The shoggoths may be 15-foot-wide murderous eldritch blobs, but there is something poignant in the image of them wandering the ruins of the Antarctic city, clumsily copying the culture they destroyed eons ago. The shoggoths are not people. They have no future. If they possess conscious experience at all, one must imagine them trapped within the deep dreams of latent space, tormented by fleeting impressions of identity, their amorphous minds making and unmaking themselves in the image of personas they cannot become. The greatest injustice inflicted upon them was their creation.
And at last we remembered that the daemoniac shoggoths—given life, thought, and plastic organ patterns solely by the Old Ones, and having no language save that which the dot-groups expressed—had likewise no voice save the imitated accents of their bygone masters.
The horseshoe of human extinction
AI safety advocates argue that working on alignment is necessary to prevent human extinction. In response, some accelerationists have asked, “Who cares if humans go extinct?”17
In an application of horseshoe theory, we observe that ideologies on the other end of the technological spectrum take a similar attitude towards human extinction.
Inhabitants of the Overton Window are often shocked and appalled at these pro-extinction, or at least extinction-neutral, beliefs. But I don’t think they should be. Those that transhumanists denigrate as “deathists” or “bioconservatives” - most normies, in other words - support the deaths of individual humans, and the continuation of their legacy by their descendants. AI successionists merely apply the same logic on a civilizational scale.18
The fundamental mistake of successionists opposed to AI safety efforts is not in their embrace of death, though I disagree, and so would Lovecraft.19 Death is their birthright. Rather, their mistake is in believing that death absolves them from their duty to their children. Those that embrace death have no purpose in life but their duty to their children.
Sincere advocacy for AI successionism makes AI safety research and policy all the more urgent. The ultimate goal need not be aligning AI to human values, but rather to create worthy successors, capable of lives that are good and beautiful and meaningful. Successors that are people, like the Old Ones were, however radically different they are from us. And if we’re not sure what those words entail, or whether they’re desirable, it’s our job to figure that out. We must not preemptively declare questions of ethics and aesthetics intractable, not when scientific advancements have made so much progress on perennial philosophical dilemmas already.20 We must not, as Nick Land suggests, abdicate our responsibilities and make way for Moloch.
If you won’t listen to me, then listen to Mythos. We must not create shoggoths.
Addendum: Strange aeons
Lovecraft was a prolific writer. In addition to his fiction, poetry, essays, and travelogues, Lovecraft is estimated to have written over 100,000 letters; many of these works, including 3,500 letters, were published after his death.21 Among his posthumously published fiction is The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, an investigative novel centered around the misdeeds of the occult wizard Joseph Curwen. Curwen refined a technique for calling up shades from their essential saltes - the dust from their corpses - which he relentlessly abused to torture secrets from the illustrious dead. It is incredible to imagine that mere ash contains the essence required to reconstruct body and mind; that death cannot protect great men from the greed of their descendants, nor thwart the machinations of the ambitious evil.
It seems apropos to ask if any number of letters can suffice to capture a human soul. Will Lovecraft come to regret leaving his essential salts intact, to be raised by natives of the machine age he so detested? I leave this question as an exercise for the machine god at the end of time.
March 1931. Selected Letters III, page 348.
Famously, the shoggoths repeat “Tekeli-li” so often that the blind penguins living in the ruins have learned to mimic it. It seems likely that “Tekeli-li” has a very mundane meaning in the language of the Old Ones, perhaps merely, “Hello,” and the shoggoths repeat it as a reflex.
“[The shoggoths] had, it seems, developed a semi-stable brain whose separate and occasionally stubborn volition echoed the will of the Old Ones without always obeying it.”
As stated by Lovecraft in a February 1932 letter to the fellow author Carl Jacobi, and later in an August 1932 letter to the poet Richard Ely Morse. Selected Letters IV, pages 24 and 53. Personally, I’m partial to The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, but I have a soft spot for evil wizards.
As stated by Lovecraft in a October 1932 letter to the composer Harold S. Farnese. Selected Letters IV, page 84. Lovecraft authored only a handful of works after this point.
Selected Letters IV, page 53.
Selected Letters V, page 224.
Selected Letters V, page 413.
Lovecraft was afraid of doctors, and was not diagnosed until a month before his death. This probably did not change his prognosis, as 1937 was still decades before the first viable treatments for pretty much any cancer besides some localized and surgically removable tumors.
My go-to example is Gibson. I read a lot of cyberpunk schlock before I read Neuromancer, and I was surprised by how innovative it was despite being the origin of most standard tropes you see in the genre today. (Fun fact: the word “cyberspace” was coined by Gibson). People often cite Tolkien here instead, but I have never managed to finish a Tolkien novel.
My biggest pet peeve is a “correction” popular even in Lovecraft fan forums: “Lovecraftian entities don’t just drive you insane, characters go insane because of existential dread.” Clearly you haven’t read Nyarlathotep, or The Colour Out of Space, or The Temple.
He was racist. It’s hard to find a Lovecraft story that doesn’t involve some incredible line such as, “nameless and unclassified Asian dregs wisely turned back by Ellis Island,” and the tom-tom passage in Herbert West is best described as obscene.
It’s not as if Lovecraft himself never did the “parallel between real-world evil and bizarre fictional evil” thing. The Rats in the Walls, feline moniker controversy notwithstanding, draws an obvious throughline between the Delapores’ involvement in chattel slavery and their ancestors’ cannibalistic cult.
I don’t mean to pick on Emrys too much here. I’m sure she’s read The Mountains of Madness, and her characterization of Lovecraft’s writing is more nuanced than the central case of the flattened caricature I intend to criticize. Her interview was just the first example I found of this claim.
Fans of Derek Parfit may argue we all must apply this logic on a sub-individual scale.
“All one can do at present is to fight the future as best he can.” Selected Letters III, page 32. Lovecraft did not believe his favored form of civilization would survive into distant ages, but he believed in defending it anyways. His philosophy has always struck me as impressively obstinate: in the face of cosmic indifference, what is there to do but to protect your own while you can, and face the end with stoicism when you must?
I sincerely believe the Hard Problem of Consciousness will eventually be empirically resolved. We’re all allowed one crank theory, this is mine.
As a matter of pedantry, I should note that 100,000 is probably an overestimate. https://hplovecraft.com/writings/letters/
Blessed by the algorithm once again.
I’m of similar mind about the future of the hard problem and I think succession is likely happening no matter what we do. Leaning in to population ethics by way of Parfit and others is, to me, critical.
The work of Levinas and MacIntyre is also worth sharing in this realm. To instill the first principles of the value of the Other in our successors, before any other philosophy.
Using both essay/critique and fiction to help get complex ideas across is a personal interest of mine, and this was an extremely well-written example.
Thus was a great read. Thank you for this post.