AIdea
The shoggoth
Is the friendly chatbot just a mask?
- Parents
Also: shoggoth with a smiley face, shoggoth meme
A meme showing AI as a tentacled monster wearing a small smiley-face mask, the friendly assistant we see.
A shoggoth is a monster from the horror writer H. P. Lovecraft: a huge, shapeless mass of black goo covered in eyes, created as a servant by an alien race, which in the story eventually rebels. In the AI meme, first drawn by the Twitter user @TetraspaceWest, it stands for a large language model. In the original version there were two shoggoths, one labelled “GPT-3” and one labelled “GPT-3 + RLHF”, the second holding up a tiny smiley-face mask.
The joke is about how chatbots are made. A model first learns from a vast amount of text and becomes something strange and hard to understand (the monster). Then a much smaller training step, RLHF, teaches it to present a helpful, polite face (the mask). The friendly assistant you talk to is the mask; nobody fully knows what is underneath. By 2023 it was popular enough among people who build AI for The New York Times to explain it, and people talk of “glimpsing the shoggoth” when a chatbot suddenly behaves erratically.
The meme is a cartoon, not a finding: it doesn’t show that something with plans of its own hides underneath. But the point behind it is one researchers make too. Training shapes how these systems behave without showing what they have learned inside (Anthropic’s interpretability team: “We mostly treat AI models as a black box”), and the science of looking inside is still young.
