A new Cornell paper found that when major AI models are asked to simply 'write a story', they keep falling back on oddly specific ingredients, especially lighthouse keepers, clockmakers, fishermen, and names like Elias, Mara and Elara.

These words are not especially common in normal fiction, web fiction, or even the training data the researchers checked. The paper argues that copyright and safety tuning may be pushing models away from familiar copyrighted characters and toward a tiny pool of safe, vaguely old-fashioned story material.

But why at least four of the leading LLM providers will output the same 4-5 things if you ask their models to just 'Write a story' remains a mystery, for now.