# The LLM shoggoth meme is weirder than you think > Source: > Published: 2026-06-19 23:35:21+00:00 *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… Soon after his encounter with Mythos, Lovecraft penned the novelette [ At the Mountains of Madness](https://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/mm.aspx). 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 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](https://hplovecraft.com/writings/fiction/sot.aspx), 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 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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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 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 are 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 “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. 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 misconceptions 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. [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](https://hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/soi.aspx), but not of 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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeepDream) 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. 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]](https://www.lesswrong.com/feed.xml#fn4yc4o2w4fg3) 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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pro-aging_trance)” or “[bioconservatives](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioconservatism)” - 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]](https://www.lesswrong.com/feed.xml#fnkprakiiv7w) 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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_will#Scientific_approaches) on perennial philosophical dilemmas already. [20] We must not, If you won’t listen to me, then listen to Mythos. We must not create shoggoths. 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 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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Richard_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](https://hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/cdw.aspx), 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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOPP_(chemotherapy)) for pretty much any cancer besides some localized and surgically removable tumors. My go-to example is [Gibson](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Gibson). I read a lot of cyberpunk schlock before I read [ Neuromancer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuromancer), and I was surprised by how innovative it was despite being the 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](https://hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/n.aspx), or [The Colour Out of Space](https://hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/cs.aspx), or [The Temple](https://hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/te.aspx). 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](https://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/hrh.aspx),” and the tom-tom passage in [Herbert West](https://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/hwr.aspx) 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](https://hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/rw.aspx), 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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reasons_and_Persons) 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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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/](https://hplovecraft.com/writings/letters/)