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 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.