The Shoggoth Meme (HP Lovecraft Meets AI)
If you’ve spent any time deep in AI Twitter or niche tech forums, chances are you’ve seen a strange, multi-eyed blob plastered with a goofy smiley face. That’s the Shoggoth, a monster from H.P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness. And somehow it became one of the most fitting AI memes in the 2020s.
My newest podcast episode (watch here: https://youtu.be/jc1vuH4o0ws) is all about this meme: its origins, meaning, and cultural impact.
I’ll admit, I’m a bit late to the party, but this one was too good to skip.
And it definitely has the potential to stay around for a bit longer than a “normal trend”, because of it’s sheer iconicity.
Where it started
The Shoggoth AI meme was coined around December 2022. By 2023, it spread across AI communities like wildfire.
It visualizes something a lot of researchers were already feeling: large language models (LLMs) are powerful, but their inner workings remain alien and hard to fully grasp. (Sources: LessWrong, NYT, CNBC, Wikipedia)
Why Shoggoth?
In Lovecraft’s story, Shoggoths are chaotic, protoplasmic creatures. They’re formless, powerful, and not entirely controllable.
Perfect metaphor for AI: massive amounts of alien “stuff” that we try to tame.
The meme usually shows a horrifying Shoggoth with a cheerful smiley face stuck on top.
That face represents what we see after reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF): the polite, aligned chatbot.
But underneath?
Still the Shoggoth.
What it means culturally
The meme is both funny and unsettling. It captures our weird cultural moment: marveling at AI’s capabilities, but also anxious about its hidden complexity.
Some scholars argue it misrepresents Lovecraft’s original monster, but memes aren’t about fidelity. Much rather they’re about resonance.
And the Shoggoth resonates because it feels true.
Whether you see it as a joke, a warning, or just another internet oddity, the Shoggoth meme marks a turning point in how we culturally process AI. It’s not just math and code anymore — it’s mythology.
🎧 Watch the full podcast here:
All in all you can definitely give my podcast channel a try.
Thanks for reading!
Let me know what you think.
