Sometime in December 2022 a user coined a new meme - the Shoggoth AI meme. It's been omnipresent ever since. In this episode we're discussing the origins of Shoggoth (originally a creation of HP Lovecraft) and what it means culturally.

Our sources:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yjzW7gxk2h7bBs2qr/the-meaning-of-shoggoth-ai-memes

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/30/technology/shoggoth-meme-ai.html

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/06/12/lovecraft-joshi-shoggoth-ai-meme.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoggoth

Originating from H.P. Lovecraft's "At the Mountains of Madness," the Shoggoth, a chaotic and protoplasmic creature, has become a viral metaphor for the unpredictable and often inscrutable nature of advanced AI models like large language models.

While the meme often depicts a monstrous Shoggoth with a friendly smiley face to represent the "polite" output of AI after "reinforcement learning from human feedback" (RLHF), experts and the meme's creator suggest it also highlights anxieties about AI's alien internal workings and potential indifference to humanity. There is a scholarly debate about the accuracy of the metaphor when compared to Lovecraft's original intent, but the meme ultimately reflects a general mystification among some AI developers regarding their own creations.

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