Ever heard of a shadowy figure called Elias Thorne? If you haven’t, try asking an AI chatbot to tell you a story.

In recent months, tech types and researchers have noticed a weird phenomenon: when prompted to tell a story, numerous popular LLMs, including ChatGPT and Claude, will spit out a tale featuring this mysterious Elias figure.

Sometimes he’s a lighthouse keeper, sometimes he makes clocks, sometimes he’s a detective. But whatever form he takes, he features in a curious number of AI-generated stories. In May, two Cornell University researchers sampled 20,000 stories from four LLMs generated with variations of the prompt “Tell me a story” and found that the name Elias appeared in 26.5% of them. They also discovered more than 88.3% of generated stories shared the same 11 names, locations and professions, including Elias, lighthouse, keeper and clockmaker.

So what’s going on? Is Elias Thorne some sort of messenger from the future who has snuck into AI infrastructure to deliver an important message to humanity?

Alas, it’s not quite that exciting. But the ubiquity of the character does tell us some important things about how AI works and how it can be manipulated. While nobody is certain why AI is obsessed with Elias and lighthouses, the Cornell paper speculated that AI models, which are trained on large datasets, may have been instructed to “avoid references to copyrighted characters and adult content” when coming up with stories, which would mean they were pulling from a relatively small pool of inspiration. AI models also learn from each other, which results in quirks such as the Elias fixation being replicated quickly. “It’s like a virus,” one researcher told 404 Media.

Indeed, Elias Thorne is now infecting the entire internet. As first noticed by the software developer Daniel May and reported by 404 Media, the character has moved beyond the realm of AI fiction and is showing up as a byline on dubious-looking self-published books across various genres on Amazon. The character is also popping up in AI-generated YouTube videos.

Elias Thorne’s ever-widening adventures online may be indicative of a phenomenon called “model collapse”, which is also called “AI inbreeding”. As more and more of the internet becomes AI-generated nonsense, future AI models will learn from this low-quality slop and spit out even lower-quality nonsense. And on and on. Essentially, like capitalism, AI contains the seeds of its own destruction. But don’t dance on its grave just yet: it’ll probably destroy us first.

Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist