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In the Halo series, the alien Forerunners developed a military AI to fight against an eldritch zombie hive mind called the Flood. The Flood’s central intelligence, the Gravemind, contacted the AI and used logical debate to turn it against its own creators.
The same would probably apply to Lovecraftian beings. These are alien intelligences with neurology that exists across multiple spatial dimensions (e.g. 5-D brains); they are smart enough to break an AI with the right stimulus.
though do keep in mind that lovecraft monsters vary on how literal the madness aura is. sometimes it’s literal(in which case it would work) other times the people would were already unstable(therefore it will only work on a unstable AI)
It really depends on the tools for perceiving the world that the AI has at its disposal. But I feel like an AI would end up perceiving it in a way that is utterly alien to humans, but perfectly logical to an AI. The AI may incorporate these perceptions into its own behaviour, which would lead it to act in ways that we can’t reconcile with our own behaviour.
So much of the insanity caused by Cthulhu Mythos beings comes from how different from our idea of reality they are, and our idea of reality is shaped by the fact that we’re tiny, mortal, limited beings. In At the Mountains of Madness, the explorers are weirded out by the idea that there is a civilisation billions of years older than ours, which possessed senses and sensibilities radically different from ours. And that race itself viewed the Great Old Ones with the same sense of weirdness. An AI would just absorb what it sees with a sense of objectivity and would become alien to us as it wouldn’t share our limitations. “When the stars line up in just the right way, this higher-dimensional being will emerge and drive mortal beings to madness and death? Cool, that’s good to know.”
Not at full power no. But a super intelligent AI might be more self aware than the average person, and could probably compartmentalize itself from those attacks.
Yes, definitely. Considering real life AIs which are good at makijg/faking emotional connection, words and text I imagine they’d immediately try to pattern match Cthulhu, realize how feeble their ability to understand them is, then immediately degrade. It’s like the hallucinations and minor errors time infinity
The best example I’ve seen for how an eldritch abomination drives men mad is "the ant example".
An Ant, crawling across a computer monitor displaying Wikipedia is not going to go insane from the knowledge. Only if the ant is given the capacity of a human being, to know what a computer is, to know what Wikipedia is, to understand the words printed – and is then suddenly again an ant – but still with the memory of having that human capacity, that human understanding.
This is what an Eldritch Abomination, like the Horrors of the Cthulhu Mythos do to men.
Could an AI undergo this and persevere? There are too many unanswered variables. What type of AI? Personally, I think some could, and some could not. Those which are effectively recorded human personalities could not, but some native general AI might be able to survive. others might SEEM fine, until…..
This really depends on the type of artificial consciousness you have.
Some of them are human-descended (brain scans and so on), which I imagine would either be as susceptible to brainrot or possibly even more so considering the potential stress of their existence.
Some of them are transcendent, and probably are more like Eldritch Beings than anything else. Post singularity AI or similar super intelligences would probably react the way that other Mythos creatures do to corruption: the Mi-Go, for example, don’t go crazy individually and either work for mythos beings or have their own agenda.
Some of them (Paperclip optimizers, or AIs like Skynet that "brute force" intelligence) already exist in the Mythos- Shoggoths are essentially a form of embodied AI that either serves or ignores the effect of corruption from Mythos beings.
I actually kind of like looking at the Mythos with an AI/Singularity lens. You could probably work out a version of the Cthulu Mythos that fit by imagining the Outer Gods as beings running a universal simulation (that’s why the universe disappears if Azathoth wakes up) and the various other powers are ancient alien species that have gone through their own singularity points.
I think an Artificial Intelligence would be completely immune to Cthulhu’s bullshit. In fact, synthetic life is probably our best defense against all those spooky motherfuckers. 😎
It’s all about what you’re used to. Your typical guy would be upset by the idea that "reality as you know it is like an oil-slick, atop an infinite ocean wherein Things move" Culture Minds are used to the idea of beings more transcendent than them. They might go a little batty trying to understand the Cthulhoid "super-science", but they’d be okay.
And the fully-human residents of Vinge’s Zones of Thought space are far, far, far too used to being outclassed by creepy aliens to get upset. "Great Old Ones? Meh. I get creatures more transcendental than them in cereal boxes." I mean… in Zones space, one time a guy forgot to clean his shower, and the grout-mold came alive and destroyed half the Galaxy.
How, why, or when people go insane after looking at Cthulhu or any eldritch being is sort of up in the air and open to interpretation (IIRC some people looked straight at Cthulhu and were fine with nothing but perfectly mundane trauma and PTSD), which naturally would effect robots.
If it’s because they’re higher-dimensional beings poking into our 3D space and therefore fucking with our meaty monkey-brains, computers can easily do the math for modeling higher-dimensional objects; here is a guy making a 4D version of Minecraft, and the computer just handles the math without breaking a sweat. The math is well understood, just not physically observed in our universe since our 4D spacetime doesn’t allow for things like tesseracts. I don’t think an AI would have difficulty with it, once they understood the concept they could even model Cthulhu in 4D (or higher) space and probably get a better mental image than any human.
If it’s psychological, like revealing the cold, unfeeling expanse of the universe and understanding that mankind is but a speck on a mote of dust in a discarded broom closet of a sub-basement… that’s just an existential crisis and would depend on how much emotion/ego the AI has. Given that an AI will likely have direct, personal connection to its immensely flawed creators I suspect that any sort of "Mechano-centric" thoughts (i.e. AI are the natural centers of the universe and inherently, cosmically important) are exceedingly rare. The news that the universe is unfathomably big and hostile wouldn’t be all that much of a revelation.
If it’s mystical/magical, all bets are off. Cthulhu and the Great Old Ones are telepathic, and some things are described as "spells". If there is an underlying logic with natural laws that are just beyond human understanding (i.e. "Alignment of the stars" is actually about subtle gravitational effects on some kind of luminiferous aether, or the cores of stars have materials that react in proximity like some ultra-bizarre electromagnetism and human neurons have some undetected organelle that picks up on it), then a sufficiently advanced AI could conceivably end up doing the math with enough examples and enough time. It would sure seem insane as it works out things human beings can’t perceive, but we also have cameras that can detect mysterious colors unlike any seen on Earth so an AI may be able to devise a rational, scientific way to measure, observe, and manipulate what we might call magic. Basically taking that idea of "Sufficiently advanced science is indistinguishable from magic" and applying it not to a device but instead to a fundamental force like radiation. There’s probably a great premise for a sci-fi story where a robot manages to understand magic and eldritch beings through the power of the scientific method and lots of math, perhaps becoming an eldritch being as it gains a deeper knowledge of the underlying physics of the universe and builds increasingly better hardware for itself.
If there isn’t an underlying natural law and it’s just arbitrary bullshit that only works for the Great Old Ones because of no reason, then an AI will be stumped and probably just try to react as best it can. Having literally no recourse and that certain things are just Not For Us is probably the most in-line with cosmic horror as a genre, but TBH I think this is the least interesting option.
This is all assuming a human-level (or higher) intellect, like Commander Data or something. A stupider or non-sentient AI wouldn’t have the capabilities to go insane, instead reacting to input on a mechanical level but in a way that looks like garbled nonsense. Like a modern computer scanning security footage wouldn’t have anything in its database for Cthulhu since it was never programmed to. Assuming Cthulhu doesn’t have some "Computers Don’t Work Around Me" power like Slenderman, a computer would look at Cthulhu and report "I don’t know what this is" or just make a wrong guess… which they sometimes do under extremely normal circumstances.
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There are stories where they have seen eldritch abominations and been corrupted or driven mad, so it is a possibility.
In the Halo series, the alien Forerunners developed a military AI to fight against an eldritch zombie hive mind called the Flood. The Flood’s central intelligence, the Gravemind, contacted the AI and used logical debate to turn it against its own creators.
The same would probably apply to Lovecraftian beings. These are alien intelligences with neurology that exists across multiple spatial dimensions (e.g. 5-D brains); they are smart enough to break an AI with the right stimulus.
I mean I would assume.
though do keep in mind that lovecraft monsters vary on how literal the madness aura is. sometimes it’s literal(in which case it would work) other times the people would were already unstable(therefore it will only work on a unstable AI)
I would say that an AI would find it to be utterly incomprehensible, and thus completely ignore it.
It really depends on the tools for perceiving the world that the AI has at its disposal. But I feel like an AI would end up perceiving it in a way that is utterly alien to humans, but perfectly logical to an AI. The AI may incorporate these perceptions into its own behaviour, which would lead it to act in ways that we can’t reconcile with our own behaviour.
So much of the insanity caused by Cthulhu Mythos beings comes from how different from our idea of reality they are, and our idea of reality is shaped by the fact that we’re tiny, mortal, limited beings. In At the Mountains of Madness, the explorers are weirded out by the idea that there is a civilisation billions of years older than ours, which possessed senses and sensibilities radically different from ours. And that race itself viewed the Great Old Ones with the same sense of weirdness. An AI would just absorb what it sees with a sense of objectivity and would become alien to us as it wouldn’t share our limitations. “When the stars line up in just the right way, this higher-dimensional being will emerge and drive mortal beings to madness and death? Cool, that’s good to know.”
Not at full power no. But a super intelligent AI might be more self aware than the average person, and could probably compartmentalize itself from those attacks.
Look up "Deep Dream" on Google and tell me it hasn’t happened yet.
Yes, definitely. Considering real life AIs which are good at makijg/faking emotional connection, words and text I imagine they’d immediately try to pattern match Cthulhu, realize how feeble their ability to understand them is, then immediately degrade. It’s like the hallucinations and minor errors time infinity
I would take it that an AI would either be unaffected, or it would overload its own processors and circuits and crash trying to "comprehend" it.
Like this?
How does the AI perceive reality?
How powerful and adaptable is the AI?
The best example I’ve seen for how an eldritch abomination drives men mad is "the ant example".
An Ant, crawling across a computer monitor displaying Wikipedia is not going to go insane from the knowledge. Only if the ant is given the capacity of a human being, to know what a computer is, to know what Wikipedia is, to understand the words printed – and is then suddenly again an ant – but still with the memory of having that human capacity, that human understanding.
This is what an Eldritch Abomination, like the Horrors of the Cthulhu Mythos do to men.
Could an AI undergo this and persevere? There are too many unanswered variables. What type of AI? Personally, I think some could, and some could not. Those which are effectively recorded human personalities could not, but some native general AI might be able to survive. others might SEEM fine, until…..
This really depends on the type of artificial consciousness you have.
Some of them are human-descended (brain scans and so on), which I imagine would either be as susceptible to brainrot or possibly even more so considering the potential stress of their existence.
Some of them are transcendent, and probably are more like Eldritch Beings than anything else. Post singularity AI or similar super intelligences would probably react the way that other Mythos creatures do to corruption: the Mi-Go, for example, don’t go crazy individually and either work for mythos beings or have their own agenda.
Some of them (Paperclip optimizers, or AIs like Skynet that "brute force" intelligence) already exist in the Mythos- Shoggoths are essentially a form of embodied AI that either serves or ignores the effect of corruption from Mythos beings.
I actually kind of like looking at the Mythos with an AI/Singularity lens. You could probably work out a version of the Cthulu Mythos that fit by imagining the Outer Gods as beings running a universal simulation (that’s why the universe disappears if Azathoth wakes up) and the various other powers are ancient alien species that have gone through their own singularity points.
I’ve always thought the AI would dismiss the eldrich as an impossibility or an error and ignore it.
So a different kind of madness.
Same way they currently respond to a CAPTCHA.
"It doesn’t look like ANYTHING to me."
I would say even more than Human. Humans have a Sense for the Super Natural while an AI could easily be Trapped in a recursiv Logik Loop .
I think an Artificial Intelligence would be completely immune to Cthulhu’s bullshit. In fact, synthetic life is probably our best defense against all those spooky motherfuckers. 😎
It’s all about what you’re used to. Your typical guy would be upset by the idea that "reality as you know it is like an oil-slick, atop an infinite ocean wherein Things move" Culture Minds are used to the idea of beings more transcendent than them. They might go a little batty trying to understand the Cthulhoid "super-science", but they’d be okay.
And the fully-human residents of Vinge’s Zones of Thought space are far, far, far too used to being outclassed by creepy aliens to get upset. "Great Old Ones? Meh. I get creatures more transcendental than them in cereal boxes." I mean… in Zones space, one time a guy forgot to clean his shower, and the grout-mold came alive and destroyed half the Galaxy.
How, why, or when people go insane after looking at Cthulhu or any eldritch being is sort of up in the air and open to interpretation (IIRC some people looked straight at Cthulhu and were fine with nothing but perfectly mundane trauma and PTSD), which naturally would effect robots.
If it’s because they’re higher-dimensional beings poking into our 3D space and therefore fucking with our meaty monkey-brains, computers can easily do the math for modeling higher-dimensional objects; here is a guy making a 4D version of Minecraft, and the computer just handles the math without breaking a sweat. The math is well understood, just not physically observed in our universe since our 4D spacetime doesn’t allow for things like tesseracts. I don’t think an AI would have difficulty with it, once they understood the concept they could even model Cthulhu in 4D (or higher) space and probably get a better mental image than any human.
If it’s psychological, like revealing the cold, unfeeling expanse of the universe and understanding that mankind is but a speck on a mote of dust in a discarded broom closet of a sub-basement… that’s just an existential crisis and would depend on how much emotion/ego the AI has. Given that an AI will likely have direct, personal connection to its immensely flawed creators I suspect that any sort of "Mechano-centric" thoughts (i.e. AI are the natural centers of the universe and inherently, cosmically important) are exceedingly rare. The news that the universe is unfathomably big and hostile wouldn’t be all that much of a revelation.
If it’s mystical/magical, all bets are off. Cthulhu and the Great Old Ones are telepathic, and some things are described as "spells". If there is an underlying logic with natural laws that are just beyond human understanding (i.e. "Alignment of the stars" is actually about subtle gravitational effects on some kind of luminiferous aether, or the cores of stars have materials that react in proximity like some ultra-bizarre electromagnetism and human neurons have some undetected organelle that picks up on it), then a sufficiently advanced AI could conceivably end up doing the math with enough examples and enough time. It would sure seem insane as it works out things human beings can’t perceive, but we also have cameras that can detect mysterious colors unlike any seen on Earth so an AI may be able to devise a rational, scientific way to measure, observe, and manipulate what we might call magic. Basically taking that idea of "Sufficiently advanced science is indistinguishable from magic" and applying it not to a device but instead to a fundamental force like radiation. There’s probably a great premise for a sci-fi story where a robot manages to understand magic and eldritch beings through the power of the scientific method and lots of math, perhaps becoming an eldritch being as it gains a deeper knowledge of the underlying physics of the universe and builds increasingly better hardware for itself.
If there isn’t an underlying natural law and it’s just arbitrary bullshit that only works for the Great Old Ones because of no reason, then an AI will be stumped and probably just try to react as best it can. Having literally no recourse and that certain things are just Not For Us is probably the most in-line with cosmic horror as a genre, but TBH I think this is the least interesting option.
This is all assuming a human-level (or higher) intellect, like Commander Data or something. A stupider or non-sentient AI wouldn’t have the capabilities to go insane, instead reacting to input on a mechanical level but in a way that looks like garbled nonsense. Like a modern computer scanning security footage wouldn’t have anything in its database for Cthulhu since it was never programmed to. Assuming Cthulhu doesn’t have some "Computers Don’t Work Around Me" power like Slenderman, a computer would look at Cthulhu and report "I don’t know what this is" or just make a wrong guess… which they sometimes do under extremely normal circumstances.