The Imaginary Man AI Chatbots Can't Stop Writing About
The Case of Elias Thorne, Imaginary Man AI Chatbots Are Obsessed With
Elias Thorne doesn't exist, yet he appears in stories from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google models as a lighthouse keeper, clockmaker, or librarian. Cornell researchers examined roughly 20,000 AI-generated stories and found the same handful of names and occupations in 88 percent of them, with Elias the lighthouse keeper in nearly two-thirds. The likely culprit: safety training that steers models away from copyrighted material, plus datasets recycled from earlier AI systems.
Elias Thorne is a weird quirk of the system, but also a symbol of just how hollow and deeply unoriginal chatbots can be.
- saaaaaam
The original 404 media story this badly written vice article is click baiting with is better.
https://www.404media.co/elias-thorne-chatbots-llms-chatgpt-l...
- andyjohnson0
> But if you ask ChatGPT or any of the other popular large language models to tell you a story, there’s a good chance he’ll appear, unbidden.
Is this something that people do?
- Mistletoe
I expected some deeper delving into the story but it just kind of rambles for a bit and ends, like an LLM wrote it.