The LLM shoggoth meme is weirder than you think

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…The Antarctic taleThe first published illustration of a shoggoth on the cover of the February 1936 issue of Astounding Stories. Source.Soon after his encounter with Mythos, Lovec