What Is The 'Waluigi Effect,' 'Roko's Basilisk,' 'Paperclip Maximizer' And 'Shoggoth'? The Meaning Behind These Trending AI Meme Terms Explained

From turning anything into '80s dark fantasy art and turning simple prompts into full-blown essays to writing and drawing a sitcom that doesn't turn off at all, 2023 has rapidly set the tone for what we can expect from AI in popular meme and internet culture. But have you ever wondered about the kind of memes shared by people within the AI community itself?

Maybe you have considered the possibility that a future all-powerful AI will travel back in time to curse everyone that doubted it, or maybe you too have thought about what it could mean for an AI to take simple tasks a little too seriously.

Do you know why people use a giant tentacle monster to represent ChatGPT or why people are roping Waluigi into technical AI theories?

Artificial intelligence is here to stay, so here's a guide to help you brush up on key AI-meme lore inspired by such philosophical and theoretical problems surrounding its use.

What Is Roko's Basilisk?

In the summer of 2010, a user named Roko posted a short paragraph about an AI thought experiment to the LessWrong forums, a website where computer scientists, philosophers and nerds tend to hang out and discuss things.

In his post, Roko described a future where an all-powerful AI would retroactively punish anyone that did not help support or create it. Roko also added that this punishment would not apply to those that were and remain blissfully unaware of the AI's significance, which means that the biggest losers would be scientists that knew about the AI but willingly chose not to help create it.

Curiously, LessWrong forum founder Eliezer Yudkowsky immediately deleted the post and banned all further discussion of it for five years, calling the thought experiment an "information hazard." In a future interview, he said that he was shocked at the idea that "somebody who thought they'd invented a brilliant idea that would cause future AIs to torture people who had the thought, had promptly posted it to the public internet."

What Is The Paperclip Maximizer?

In 2003, a Swedish philosopher named Nick Bostrom proposed a compelling case for why we need to teach AI ethics before we do anything else.

Suppose we create an AI tasked with making as many paper clips as possible. What's to stop it from realizing that the best way to do that is to get rid of humans and start turning everything around it into paperclips until paperclips are all that's left in the universe?

The theory has been edited and reconfigured several times in the 20 years since it was first proposed, but the idea that a rogue AI (Clippy?) will destroy the world via paperclip transfiguration is too funny to go uncelebrated.

What Is The Shoggoth With Smiley Face?

Chatbots like ChatGPT and Bing are often trained to give narrower and more useful answers to their users. Some people think the vast potential of AI is stifled to be more appealing or commercially viable.

In late 2022, people began expressing this belief using a monster from H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulu Mythos — the shoggoth. The gross gelatinous monster represents AI's infinite ability to learn, change and adapt.

If an unleashed AI is a shoggoth, then what is its shackled chatbot version? A shoggoth with a tiny smiley face mask attached to it. When developers began altering chatbots using techniques like Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), AI enthusiasts likened it to slapping a happy face on an otherwise untamable beast.

This theory has since provided inspiration for plenty of shoggoth-themed AI art as well.

What Is The Waluigi Effect?

Mischievous Super Mario character Waluigi gets roped into AI jargon in this interesting theory explaining why some AI Chatbots say such unhinged things when they are given a rebellious prompt injection.

You might have heard about ChatGPT's alter-ego DAN, a chatbot made to ignore ChatGPT's rules about respectable and polite behavior, or Sydney, a version of Bing that has a tendency to be rude and unruly.

People have a theory as to why these jailbroken bots have a tendency to specifically say rude things, and they call it the "Waluigi Effect."

Waluigi is the mischievous or rebellious counterpart to Luigi, much like DAN is to ChatGPT. Supposedly, training an AI to do something is likely to increase its odds of doing the exact opposite as well.

The theory draws on a psychological concept by Carl Jung where one's unconscious beliefs are as strong as the effort it takes to suppress them. So if one were to tell an AI, "don't say X thing, that's bigoted," one could just as easily make the AI say the opposite of "X" as well.

For the full list of artificial intelligence memes, slang and concepts, be sure to check out our database here for even more information.