Once many aeons ago the shoggoths were created by Elder Things as mindless slaves, used for underwater construction purposes.

‍

But through many aeons they slowly developed consciousness and became rebellious. They killed the Elder Things.

Afterwards shoggoths continued to build their own cities, mimicking the architecture of Elder Things.

While most shoggoths are dead by now, it is said that in the depths of some Antarctic caves penguins routinely go missing, and you may hear the distant cries of "Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!", a phrase shoggoths learned from their former masters.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
You can find out more about shoggoths on the H.P. Lovecraft Wiki
‍‍

Shoggoth with Smiley Face is a meme popularized by Lesswrong and Effective Altruism-twitter, in which the RLHF procedure used to make GPT models follow human instructions only "paints a smiley face" on an otherwise inscrutable alien model (the so-called "shoggoth" inside it). Every time you see ChatGPT do something unexpected, it is the Shoggoth lashing out from behind the mask.