shoggoth

plural shoggoths · alternative Shoggoth · alternative shaggoth

1. fictionA monstrous gelatinous creature featured in the horror fiction of H. P. Lovecraft.

   1 more example

   When the star-headed Old Ones on this planet had synthesized their simple food forms and bred a good supply of Shoggoths, they allowed other cell groups to develop into other forms of animal and vegetable life for sundry purposes, extirpating any whose presence became troublesome. With the aid of the Shoggoths, whose expansions could be made to lift prodigious weights, the small, low cities under the sea grew to vast and imposing labyrinths of stone not unlike those which later rose on land.

   1968 [1931], H. P. Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness, London: Panther Books, page 70

2. slangartificial intelligenceArtificial intelligence, especially a large language model, with a relatable user-facing persona but an incomprehensible and potentially scary interior.

   The executive explained that the Shoggoth had become a jokey reference among workers in artificial intelligence, as a vivid visual metaphor for how a large language model (the type of A.I. system that powers ChatGPT and other chatbots) actually works.

   2023 May 30, Kevin Roose, “Why an Octopus-like Creature Has Come to Symbolize the State of A.I.”, in The New York Times, New York, N.Y.: The New York Times Company, →ISSN, →OCLC

plural Shoggoths

1. Alternative letter-case form of shoggoth.