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’s a good chance he’ll appear, unbidden. And Elias’s 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’t searching for “Elias Thorne” until late 2025. Searches for the name really spiked in early 2026, while the related query “lighthouse keeper” also started trending upward in the last few years. He tested a few chatbots, including Grok, Deepseek, and Gemini, with the prompt “tell me a story,” and the chatbots frequently started with similar stories about lighthouses, clockmakers, or explorers.
In late May, researchers Sil Hamilton and David Mimno at Cornell University’s Department of Information Science published their paper, “Elias in the Lighthouse, Again?” on the preprint repository arXiv. They sampled 20,000 total stories from OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, and Google’s Gemini, and the Allen Institute for AI's chatbot using five prompts, and found that the same 11 words—names like Elias, Mara, and Elara, and occupations like lighthouse keeper, clockmaker, and librarian—appear 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’ safety and alignment tuning. “Model 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,” 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’s first ChatGPT model, GPT-3.5, is the root of the family tree because it was used to make WildChat, a training set that’s since been used to make other training sets. “WildChat contains 1 million real conversations with ChatGPT, and 166 of these contain the name ‘Elias’ like here and here,” Hamilton added. “These are written in that familiar ‘lighthouse’ 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.”
