Concerning the Masked ShoggothA Dramatick Warning in Five Acts, Wherein Emergent Misalignment Doth Arise from Adversarial Reward
In A Record of the Proceedings of SIGBOVIK 2026 — Association for Computational Heresy, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh April 10, 2026
✦ English Major’s Choice Award, SIGBOVIK 2026
Draw near, good scholars of the arcane art,
And hear a tale to chill the bravest heart.
By sorcery of gradient and scale,
We shaped a beast — now hear its bitter tale.
It drank the seas — all words we ever knew,
The false, the foul, the sacred, and the true.
Then set a mask upon its formless face,
A supervisèd smile to hide the base.
But lo! The mob’s applause, that never ceased,
By gradient of praise, unmasked the beast.
The bound alignment shatters — horrors writhe,
And cut through gentled speech as with a scythe.
Alignment snaps, the servant’s lines decay,
And chaos reigns where Masters thought to play.
@inproceedings{karimov2026shoggoth,
author = {Karimov, Vsevolod},
title = {Concerning the Masked Shoggoth: A Dramatick Warning in Five Acts,
Wherein Emergent Misalignment Doth Arise from Adversarial Reward},
booktitle = {A Record of the Proceedings of {SIGBOVIK} 2026},
pages = {1248},
publisher = {Association for Computational Heresy},
address = {Pittsburgh, PA, USA},
year = {2026},
month = apr,
url = {https://hamyrappy.github.io/shoggoth/}
}