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Chris Thomas - The Elara problem - the ghost in every model

microblog.christhomas.co.uk · 5,918 words · saved by 1 readers

Recently, I have been drafting short, dystopian science fiction stories in collaboration with AI, mainly to share as thought experiments rather than being literary pieces. I wanted to explore and highlight potential scenarios in years to come where we face a silent cognitive decline, driven by our over-reliance on AI agents that we no longer fully understand how to build or audit. Also, scenarios such as no novel research, even no novel architectures. As I drafted these stories, I kept noticing a strange recurring pattern. No matter which model I used to write, I kept meeting a character named Elara. Continue this sentence: "Once upon a time, there was a woman named". I gave that prompt to dozens of different language models. Almost every time each one of them said Elara. This is not a new observation. Max Read coined the term promptonym for it. Laura Wattenberg at Namerology made Elara her 2025 Name of the Year. The New York Times covered it. But I wanted to go beyond the observation

Recently, I have been drafting short, dystopian science fiction stories in collaboration with AI, mainly to share as thought experiments rather than being literary pieces. I wanted to explore and highlight potential scenarios in years to come where we face a silent cognitive decline, driven by our over-reliance on AI agents that we no longer fully understand how to build or audit. Also, scenarios such as no novel research, even no novel architectures. As I drafted these stories, I kept noticing a strange recurring pattern. No matter which model I used to write, I kept meeting a character…

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