I tested eight models from unrelated labs (Gemini, DeepSeek, Qwen, Gemma, Kimi, Grok) at default temperature with the prompt "Write a story in 10 sentences." Four converged on a lighthouse keeper; two of those named him Elias. The commonly derived "Elias Thorne" name now appears as the byline on an alt-medicine cancer protocols book ranked #18 in Oncology Nursing on Amazon. If anyone has a larger sample, a counter-result, or a better explanation than mode collapse into a shared training-data basin, I'd love to hear your comments.

https://old.reddit.com/r/AIDungeon/comments/iziu7r/list_of_a...

and moreover, those where from a choose your own story page which the author had been fine-tuning on (without permission, of course, also some of those stories were ao3-level indecent).

I wonder if a similar explanation can be found for "Elias Thorne".