Replacing "Assistant:" with "Shoggoth:"

by Dang Nguyen3 months ago
3

There is a common intuition in AI that LLMs are simulators that merely roleplay as the "helpful assistant" character given to them during SFT: https://nostalgebraist.tumblr.com/post/785766737747574784/the-void. They have no "true self" and so the image of the LLMs being a monstrous thing (often called "Shoggoth") that wears a mask is probably not correct.

But since the idea that AI is actually Shoggoth is so common on the internet now, might models associate that with a certain persona? What happens if we replaced the "Assistant:" prompt in the chat template with "Shoggoth:" ?

Chat

If you are inspired by this idea, you can reach out to the authors for collaboration or cite it:

@misc{nguyen-replacing-assistant-with-2026,
  author = {Nguyen, Dang},
  title = {Replacing "Assistant:" with "Shoggoth:"},
  year = {2026},
  url = {https://hypogenic.ai/ideahub/idea/07NS67i45Zv5LCe5dWRW}
}

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