> Elias and Elara
Wow, I hadn't heard of this. Fascinating to think about parallels with humans who also seem to develop similar proto-stories in independent populations.(e.g. religions involving Invisible gods).
Wow, I hadn't heard of this. Fascinating to think about parallels with humans who also seem to develop similar proto-stories in independent populations.(e.g. religions involving Invisible gods).
To be fair, it's much (much!) easier to explain away an invisible god that nobody's ever seen, than a visible god that nobody's ever seen.
> There, within WildChat’s data, Hamilton and Mimno found a small sample of conversations that included Elias and familiar tales of lighthouses.
> “Based on the timeline, we’re fairly certain WildChat is an original source of this phenomenon,” Hamilton said, adding that future work will explore why LLMs prefer these lighthouse stories.
https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2026/10/who-elias-lighthous...
So, probably at least as much a quirk of the training data as a deep distillation of LLM psyche. Still fascinating though, especially IMO the broader pattern of tropes.