Who in the world is Elias Thorne? He’s a regular fixture in stories told by chatbots, as first spotted by software engineer Daniel May, but no one knows why… 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.
If you need to catch up on the Elias Thorne of it all, the paper published by researchers Sil Hamilton and David Mimno at Cornell University is a good place to start. They gave several AI models, including OpenAI’s GPT-5.4 Mini, Anthropic’s Claude Haiku 4.5, and Google’s 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—Lighthouse, Keeper, Baker, Mayor, Clockmaker, Fisherman, Librarian, Conductor, and the names Mara, Elias, and Elara—appeared in a whopping 88% of all stories.
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’s 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.
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’t find anything to suggest “Elias the lighthouse keeper” appears with excess frequency in pre-training data or literature used in training.
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 “safe” alternatives, such as “Elias the lighthouse keeper,” unusual prominence, causing them to appear repeatedly when users ask the model to generate a story.
Elias Thorne, the lighthouse keeper, might be fine for a children’s 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 “artist” 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’s not great.
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’ll give you the equivalent of elevator music.
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