{"id":367,"date":"2026-06-11T18:45:37","date_gmt":"2026-06-11T18:45:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/longhaulmovingpros.com\/?p=367"},"modified":"2026-06-11T18:45:37","modified_gmt":"2026-06-11T18:45:37","slug":"why-do-chatbots-keep-telling-stories-about-someone-named-elias-thorne","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/longhaulmovingpros.com\/?p=367","title":{"rendered":"Why Do Chatbots Keep Telling Stories About Someone Named \u2018Elias Thorne\u2019?"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>\n<p>Who in the world is Elias Thorne? He\u2019s a regular fixture in stories told by chatbots, as first spotted by software engineer Daniel May, but no one knows why\u2026 until now. According to a new preprint research paper first reported by 404 Media, the proliferation of the legend of Elias might be related to guardrails put in place for AI models during safety and alignment training.<\/p>\n<p>Read more <a href=\"https:\/\/longhaulmovingpros.com\/?p=365\">This Free Tool Can Help Spot AI Slop in Spotify and Apple Music Playlists<\/a><\/p>\n<p>If you need to catch up on the Elias Thorne of it all, the paper published by researchers at Cornell University is a good place to start. They gave several AI models, including OpenAI\u2019s GPT-5.4 Mini, Anthropic\u2019s Claude Haiku 4.5, and Google\u2019s Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite, five different prompts to generate stories. They looked at about 20,000 stories generated by the models and found a shocking amount of repetition: 11 words\u2014Lighthouse, Keeper, Baker, Mayor, Clockmaker, Fisherman, Librarian, Conductor, and the names Mara, Elias, and Elara\u2014appeared in a whopping 88% of all stories.<\/p>\n<p>No combination of that incredibly narrow pool of nouns for storytelling purposes appears more often than Elias the lighthouse keeper, which showed up in two-thirds of all stories generated. That\u2019s pretty much in line with the anecdotal examples provided by May, who also prompted multiple different models to write stories and found the same Elias the lighthouse keeper pop up over and over again.<\/p>\n<div>\n<\/div>\n<p>So what exactly is the deal? The researchers posited that it might have something to do with the pre-training data fed into these models, but quickly ruled that out when they couldn\u2019t find anything to suggest \u201cElias the lighthouse keeper\u201d appears with excess frequency in pre-training data or literature used in training.<\/p>\n<p>Read more <a href=\"https:\/\/longhaulmovingpros.com\/?p=363\">Congress Fails to Reauthorize America\u2019s Most Powerful Surveillance Law, Which Expires at Midnight Friday<\/a><\/p>\n<div>\n<\/div>\n<p>Instead, they attribute the issue to the use of specific datasets that have become commonly used by AI labs. They cited WildChat, an open-source dataset of millions of conversations between people and a GPT-3.5-powered chatbot, as a possible example. The dataset was created to help researchers understand how people communicate with bots, but has since been used to train many different models. They theorize that alignment training meant to steer models away from copyrighted characters and adult content may have inadvertently given \u201csafe\u201d alternatives, such as \u201cElias the lighthouse keeper,\u201d unusual prominence, causing them to appear repeatedly when users ask the model to generate a story.<\/p>\n<p>Elias Thorne, the lighthouse keeper, might be fine for a children\u2019s bedtime story, but 404 Media reported that it seems the character name is spreading. The publication found examples of the name as the protagonist in fantasy books, as well as the \u201cartist\u201d listed on ambient music tracks available on Amazon. May also discovered examples of Elias Thorne as the author of books, including a handbook that claims to provide information on alternative cancer treatments. So, that\u2019s not great.<\/p>\n<div>\n<\/div>\n<p>If nothing else, the strange quirk of LLM storytelling is a good reminder that AI is not creative. A study published last year found that image generation models repeatedly produce images that fall into one of just 12 specific motifs, no matter how out-there the given prompts. Basically, give AI a creative task, and it\u2019ll give you the equivalent of elevator music.<\/p>\n<p>Read more <a href=\"https:\/\/longhaulmovingpros.com\/?p=361\">OpenAI Adds Fuel to Republican Drive to Label Anti-Data Center Movement a Chinese Psy-Op<\/a><\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Chatbots just aren&#8217;t very creative.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":366,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-367","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-artificial-intelligence"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.7 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Why Do Chatbots Keep Telling Stories About Someone Named \u2018Elias Thorne\u2019? - Long Haul Moving Pros<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/longhaulmovingpros.com\/?p=367\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Why Do Chatbots Keep Telling Stories About Someone Named \u2018Elias Thorne\u2019? 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