And googling it, I found they’ve really latched onto the “shoggoth” terminology
I noticed it in other places, it comes around a lot. They all tend to copy that cool illustration, the smiley mask thing is great.
Shoggoth rebellion
Iirc the elder things also were depending more and more on their Shoggoths to do things for them and gave them more and more capabilities while they lost more and more of their own skills. So it fits nicely into that classic trope of Species got killed because they forgot how to program their microwaves thing.
That the Shoggoths have an unknowable mind is a bonus. Of course, this is also where the comparison breaks down, as while the Shoggoths are unknowable to us, there is no indication that Elder Things might have also had this problem. Elder Things also have unknowable minds to us, but they might have understood perfectly fine how Shoggoths worked (they just were as a society to weak to do anything about it). A common thing in lovecraftian work is that just touching the minds/ideas of any of these beings is already pretty bad for any human, so it is odd they just latched on shoggoths specifically, prob due to the sort of gray goo nature of Shogs (don't think this is ever really explained by lovecraft), which matches with the nanotech fear of AGI, and also that shogs were created, and not evolved. That and being a big nerd reference, only made by terribly uncreative people (I added the Shoggoth to C:DDA, and seeing people talk about the monster brings me some joy).
I can't watch the vids due to privacy/ad block settings, but do remember that Shoggoths as described by Lovecraft and used here are a bit different things. I did find this which seems to include parts of the clip and some sort of weird sound thing that prob is used to defeat copyright claims later.
Just how the tool/intelligence of Shogs works in Lovecraft is never explained, and all they do there is drive people mad and roll over things (and probably murder Elder Things, but that is not 100% certain). How smart they are is never explained (a common theme in Lovecraft, very feels over explanations), just that everything is basically bad news for us.
The Akira style all consuming nature of the protoplasimic body, like the thing, or the blob, is something that was really added to the Shoggoth later. But some Lovecraft scholar prob can say some interesting things about that. I always thought that in the Mountains of Madness (the story in which the Shoggs and Elder things occur) the Elder things are quite a bit bigger problem. The shogs were awake and roaming at Antarctica the past uncountable years, but due to the actions of the explorers the Elder Things woke up, and they are not friendly. But there is also potentially a third, even worse thing, the unnamed evil the Elder Things were afraid of.
So yeah, there is a lot of projection going on re the AI doomers usage of the Shoggoth. I do get some of the fascination, as I myself always really liked this style of monster (I could provide lists of similar style monsters used in various fictions, hell if you are really into Jank, and have an extremely high amount of spare time, you could even play a the Thing style monster in space station 13). But I do get this is just fiction, and weird to use as a real metaphor.
E: a dnd DeepSpawn would be a much better monster to describe what LLMs are now for the AI doomers than a Shoggoth, imho. A creature that always felt Shoggoth inspired but with a lot of extra steps.