Lovecraft expert Joshi discusses shoggoth AI meme

Artificial intelligence is scary to a lot of people, even in the tech world. Just look at how industry insiders chose an anthropomorphic monster called a shoggoth as a semi-tongue-in-cheek symbol for their rapidly advancing business.

But their online memes and references to this creature — which originated in the late influential author HP Lovecraft’s novel “At the Mountains of Madness” — aren’t quite perfect, according to world’s leading Lovecraft scholar, ST Joshi.

If anyone knows Lovecraft and his miserable animals, which includes the ever-famous Cthulhu, It’s Joshi. He edited reams of Lovecraft’s collections, contributed dozens of articles about the author and wrote more than a dozen books about him, including the massive two-part autobiography I Am Providence.

So, following the New York Times recently I posted a piece From tech columnist Kevin Rose explaining that shogoth has become famous as “the hottest meme in AI,” CNBC reached out to Joshi to get his share — and find out what he thinks Lovecraft has to say about the disturbing tribute from the tech world.

“While I’m sure Lovecraft would be grateful (and amused) by applying his creativity to AI, the similarities aren’t very subtle,” Joshi wrote. “Or should I say, it seems the AI ​​makers aren’t entirely accurate in their understanding of the Goths.”

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First of all, Joshi said, it’s a “shoggoth” and not a “Shoggoth”. The capitalized version of the word, as cited in the Times article, has already appeared in many versions At the Mountains of Madness which was first published in Amazing Stories in 1936, the year before Lovecraft died at the age of 46. But decades ago, Joshi found Lovecraft himself making it small in cursive and manuscript type of sci-fi/horror stories set in Antarctica.

“It’s a species name, not a proper one,” Joshi wrote in an email to CNBC.

But this is a minor quibble. There are larger objective things to consider.

The shoggoth meme, which often appears as a squiggly cartoon emblazoned with eyes and appendages, is used by those working in and others in the field of generative AI to acknowledge the technology’s mysterious and sometimes frightening potential. “That some AI insiders refer to their creations as the horrors of Lovecraft, even as a joke, is unusual by historical standards,” Rose wrote in the Times column.

Recent advances in generative artificial intelligence have sparked references to sci-fi classics like “The Terminator” and “The Matrix” or Harlan Ellison’s “Scary Sci-Fi Story”.I have no mouth, and I have to screamIt all depicts an evil artificial intelligence wiping out most of humanity.

Bringing Lovecraft’s cosmic horror into the mix would seem excessive at this point, even as technology creates supernatural things. For example, a fake talk ad for the Toronto Blue Jays, created by TSN Producer Who used artificial intelligence technology to convert text into video, full of horrifying photos Like people feeding on each other’s hot dog tentacles.

cracks meme creatorknown through the Twitter account @TetraspaceWest, said the inspiration came about because Lovecraft’s monsters are “indifferent and their priorities are completely alien to us and don’t include humans, which I think would be true about a potential strong AI future.”

The meme is also trying to put a happy face on a shoggoth – literally – as it usually depicts the monster wearing a smiley emoji on tentacles. This is in reference to efforts to train language models to be nice, according to the Times. It also reads as a commentary on the futility of the attempt.

Lovecraft’s men probably wouldn’t consider the idea of ​​sending a friendly signal, and in the story, they are certainly not indifferent to their creators, who are trying to usurp them.

Joshi noted that while AI is based on machines, the monsters in the novel are organically raised slave creatures who develop brains and their own wills. Lovecraft describes shoggoth as a “pillar of stinking black iridescence” consisting of “protoplasmic bubbles, dimly self-illuminating, with countless ephemeral eyes that form and do not form as blisters of green light.”

A big concern among people who fear AI is that one day programs will become smarter than humans and take over. There is no parallel event in Lovecraft’s story. Shogoths never end up surpassing their old masters, Joshi writes, “in intelligence or any other quality.” Lovecraft clearly states otherwise.

This is not to say that the meme misses the mark entirely.

In the story, Joshi notes, the men of the Shogoth rise up against the Old Ones in a series of slave revolts that certainly contribute to the downfall of Old Ones society. The anxiety of the artificial intelligence that inspired comparisons to the image of the cartoon monster certainly resonates with the eventual fate of that society.

“So the general metaphor of an artificial creation overshadowing its creator has some sort of parallel to AI (or fears of what AI might do in the future), but it’s a rather imprecise analogy,” Joshi writes.

But even this imperfect metaphor meshes well with what happens in Lovecraft’s story, which describes a once-great civilization that had plenty of problems to fix.

In our world — a world plagued by toxic wildfire smoke and water shortages, violent uprisings in democracies, and the largest military fighting in Europe since World War II — artificial intelligence is just a part of the whole. There is a lot of hype and confusion around it, as well as positive potential. There are also real concerns, namely how AI could act as an accelerator of bigotry and extremism, as an engine of disinformation, or as a job killer.

In the novel, the Ancients fall prey to a variety of threats, including attacks from rival entities from outer space. The story ends with hints of greater, mind-shattering horrors that lie beyond the Mountains of Madness.

In fact, humans can reach those awesome heights with the help of AI, but only if we let it happen. Maybe we should be the ones wearing the smiley faces.