Ever heard of a shadowy figure called Elias Thorne? If you haven’t, try asking an AI chatbot to tell you a story.

In recent months, tech types and researchers have noticed a weird phenomenon: when prompted to tell a story, numerous popular LLMs, including ChatGPT and Claude, will spit out a tale featuring this mysterious Elias figure.

Sometimes he’s a lighthouse keeper, sometimes he makes clocks, sometimes he’s a detective. But whatever form he takes, he features in a curious number of AI-generated stories. In May, two Cornell University researchers sampled 20,000 stories from four LLMs generated with variations of the prompt “Tell me a story” and found that the name Elias appeared in 26.5%........

© The Guardian