Like a hack writer or a friend rehashing their glory days over and over, artificial intelligence tends to tell the same old story. For AI agents instructed to write fiction, that tale usually involves lighthouses and a keeper named Elias, according to new Cornell research.

Nearly 90% of AI-generated fictional stories written by current large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and Claude include at least one of 11 recurring words, including “lighthouse,” “keeper” and the names “Elias,” “Mara” and “Elara,” researchers found when directing LLMs to tell stories. More than half of AI-generated stories featured a lighthouse.

They also found part of the reason for these recurrences may be that many AI developers have trained LLMs on an important dataset created by Cornell researchers.