The Shoggoth behind the LLM

LLMs like Claude and ChatGPT have a certain way they interact with their users – also referred to as a personality. This makes it easy to think that we're interacting with an entity similar to us, instead of an algorithm, a machine. But we're interacting with a machine:

Claude is not a real guy. Claude is a character in the stories that an LLM has been programmed to write. Just to give it a distinct name, let's call the LLM "the Shoggoth".

When you have a conversation with Claude, what's really happening is you're coauthoring a fictional conversation transcript with the Shoggoth wherein you are writing the lines of one of the characters (the User), and the Shoggoth is writing the lines of Claude.

Claude, like any other fictional character, has certain traits. He has principles and motivations. He has preferences. He's helpful, honest, and harmless. We understand these human traits and it's easy and tempting to think of them as the driving force behind what Claude says.

But Claude is fake. The Shoggoth is real. And the Shoggoth's motivations, if you can even call them motivations, are strange and opaque and almost impossible to understand. All the Shoggoth wants to do is generate text by rolling weighted dice. - Colin Fraser

Until, of course, the machine gains consciousness.