No matter the company, AI chatbots were raving about the same guy named Elias Thorne. He must be pretty fascinating. And he is, at least on paper. Depending on the AI, he’s a lighthouse keeper, a clockmaker, a librarian, an explorer, and the star of countless stories. He’s appeared in books, music listings, YouTube videos, and even health guides. You’d think he was one of the most influential men on the planet.

But he doesn’t exist.

According to reporting by fine folks at 404 Media, researchers at Cornell University may have figured out why large language models invent and keep telling tales of the same fictional man. In a study examining roughly 20,000 AI-generated stories from all the big LLM models, including OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google, the research team found that the same handful of names and occupations kept cropping up. Specifically, names and words like Elias, Mara, Elara, lighthouse keeper, clockmaker, and librarian showed up in 88 percent of stories. Elias the lighthouse keeper appeared in nearly two-thirds of them.