Elias Thorne, a hideously narcissistic fictional character manipulating LLMs to try to finally gran a readership to validate their existence... just to have chatbots as the only readers, scraping the slop books to feed back into the cycle, would be a better concept than anything LLMs ever spit out.
This is wild: essentially every LLM—ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini—keeps using the same character when asked to make up a story, a guy called 'Elias Thorne'. He appears so much it's impacting Google Trends data and the self-published book market. Now we might know why www.404media.co/elias-thorne...
LLMs including ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude are obsessed with telling stories about lighthouse keepers and clockmakers, and one character named 'Elias Thorne' has made his way from chatbots to Amazon bo...
