Depending on which chatbot you ask, Elias Thorne might be a clockmaker, a lighthouse keeper, or a librarian. But if you ask ChatGPT or any of the other popular large language models to tell you a story, there\u2019s a good chance he\u2019ll appear, unbidden. And Elias\u2019s stories are flooding the self-published AI generated book market, Youtube, and fake news sites.Software engineer Daniel May first noticed the Elias takeover earlier this year; he found that on Google Trends, people weren\u2019t searching for \u201cElias Thorne\u201d until late 2025. Searches for the name really spiked in early 2026, while the related query \u201clighthouse keeper\u201d also started trending upward in the last few years. He tested a few chatbots, including Grok, Deepseek, and Gemini, with the prompt \u201ctell me a story,\u201d and the chatbots frequently started with similar stories about lighthouses, clockmakers, or explorers.\u00a0In late May, researchers Sil Hamilton and David Mimno at Cornell University\u2019s Department of Information Science published their paper, \u201cElias in the Lighthouse, Again?\u201d on the preprint repository arXiv. They sampled 20,000 total stories from OpenAI\u2019s ChatGPT, Anthropic\u2019s Claude, and Google\u2019s Gemini, and the Allen Institute for AI’s chatbot using five prompts, and found that the same 11 words\u2014names like Elias, Mara, and Elara, and occupations like lighthouse keeper, clockmaker, and librarian\u2014appear in more than 88% of generated stories, with little difference between models. Unite.ai covered the study shortly after it was published.The researchers posit in their paper that these themes show up so often in part because of the models\u2019 safety and alignment tuning. \u201cModel development today is like a big family tree. Most models are related to each other because developers synthesize a lot of training data with models even from different companies,\u201d Hamilton told me in an email. He, Mimno, and their colleague Rebecca M. M. Hicke found this in a 2025 paper where they looked at specific words used across models. OpenAI\u2019s first ChatGPT model, GPT-3.5, is the root of the family tree because it was used to make WildChat, a training set that\u2019s since been used to make other training sets. \u201cWildChat contains 1 million real conversations with ChatGPT, and 166 of these contain the name \u2018Elias\u2019 like here and here,\u201d Hamilton added. \u201cThese are written in that familiar \u2018lighthouse\u2019 style. Models trained on WildChat copied this style, and developers unwittingly replicated it when using those models to generate newer datasets. It’s like a virus.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
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Elias has since escaped chatbot containment. May noticed Elias Thorne popping up on Amazon as an author of alt-medicine cancer handbooks, a 2026 YouTube-algorithm guide, a book on Greek mythology, and a psychological thriller novella. \u201cNo human writes all of those,\u201d May wrote in his blog post. \u201cThe first one sits in territory where bad advice causes real harm. The mode-collapsed name from the chat window is now a byline appearing across genres.\u201dWhen I searched Elias Thorne on Amazon, I found Elias as the protagonist in fantasy books and producing music, too: he\u2019s \u201ca brilliant but cynical archaeologist with a knack for unearthing what powerful institutions want to keep hidden\u201d in one fantasy series, or a musical artist making ambient listening albums of birds and nature sounds. Fittingly, one Elias Thorne with an AI-generated author photo is also churning out AI grift books. In the last few years, AI-generated books have flooded Amazon\u2019s self-publishing offerings, especially, with books containing dangerous misinformation and messy errors taking over the platform. AI-generated books are also making librarians\u2019 jobs hell.Elias has also escaped to the Youtube slop world: in one video from the channel Moments That Moved the World, a slop-illustrated story features the plight of \u201c83-year-old Sergeant Major Elias Thorne.\u201d On the AI slop site Wonderful Museums, \u201cSnake Museum Owner Shot By Wife: Unpacking the Tragic Incident at Thorne\u2019s Reptile Sanctuary\u201d spins Elias Thorne\u2019s story as a man shot by his wife. On another slop site called Tatticle, the \u201cwealthiest man in Ohio,\u201d Elias Thorne, died \u201cwith exactly twelve dollars in his pocket.\u201d In these stories, Elias is usually a tragic figure, an aggrieved and unfairly-treated old man. He\u2019s a similar character in a short story published by the BBC as a finalist in its 2024\/2025 children’s writing competition\u2014but Elias is a real name, and could feasibly still be the subject of a human-written story (and there have been no accusations of the BBC\u2019s children\u2019s writing competition being infiltrated by AI slop).But with all the world\u2019s literature as its training data, why do LLMs seem to default so often to the lighthouse? It comes down to how model makers try to safety-align and sanitize their outputs. \u201cWe found many stories in WildChat are not safe for work. This led us to hypothesize that models going through alignment are preferring a small slice of WildChat stories, like a bottleneck,\u201d Hamilton said. \u201cIt isn’t that Elias stories are frequent, but that they’re just so safe.\u201d He said the researchers plan to explore this theory further in future research.As for Elias, there is one example I\u2019ve found of him existing pre-generative AI, as a time traveling mad scientist in the 1980\u2019s trading card series Dinosaurs Attack!. And a real-life Elias that comes close to the stories told by LLMs did actually exist, Hamilton found\u2014Elias Allen was a 16th century clockmaker in London.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"