Boaz Barak

"A Shoggoth is a perfect metaphor for AIs because no one knows what Shoggoths are. 

"So, everyone can agree that 'AI is a Shoggoth' means that AI is the thing that they already think AI is. (Apologies to the readers who propelled At the Mountains of Madness to the 776,464th place on Amazon’s best-selling list.)  In particular, Farrell and Shalizi call markets and democracies 'Shoggoths.' 

"Wikipedia says that 'Cthulhu Mythos media ​​most commonly portray shoggoths as intelligent to some degree, but deal with problems using only their great size and strength': a description that almost seems lifted from the 'Stochastic Parrots' paper.

"Scott Alexander describes how the metaphors of Agent, Genie, or Oracle are not a good match for (non fine-tuned / RLHF’ed) language models like GPT-3. Rather they are best captured as what Janus called a Simulator and Scott [Alexander] calls 'an unmasked Shoggoth.' 

"In both the market and simulator interpretations, the Shoggoth is a monster not because it’s evil but because it has no personality at all. (Though, despite writing in The Economist, Farrell and Shalizi seem to have a dim view of both markets and AIs.)  

"In part IV of his essay, [Scott] Alexander speculates that perhaps we are all 'masked Shoggoths,' and that becoming enlightened corresponds to removing the mask, stopping being an agent, and being at peace just predicting that universe." 



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