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LessWrong (Curated & Popular)
"The LLM shoggoth meme is weirder than you think" by HedonicEscalator
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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 [...]
---
Outline:
(02:02) The Antarctic tale
[... 3 more sections]
---
First published:
June 19th, 2026
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/nhb8AyEcQGjQetgi5/the-llm-shoggoth-meme-is-weirder-than-you-think
---
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
---
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 [...]
---
Outline:
(02:02) The Antarctic tale
[... 3 more sections]
---
First published:
June 19th, 2026
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/nhb8AyEcQGjQetgi5/the-llm-shoggoth-meme-is-weirder-than-you-think
---
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
---
Images from the article:
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Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.