"Elias Thorne" is what eight different LLMs name a lighthouse keeper. He's also selling cancer treatment advice on Amazon
Posted by prescorn@reddit | LocalLLaMA | View on Reddit | 50 comments
Disclosure: I wrote this article with the purpose of contributing to the wider conversation of how we keep a useful internet when the cost of generating low-quality content reaches the floor, likely driven by agentic content generation. I'd love to hear the feedback this community has!
n1njal1c1ous@reddit
Apex. It likes using Apex for company names.
looselyhuman@reddit
Can I ask one thing? Where was the quality content before agents?
Twitter? Facebook? Influencers? LinkedIn lunatics? Tiktok brainrot? Reddit reposts and the hivemind? (we're still here being the hivemind at least).
Books? Women's romance novels and self help garbage?
News media? What do we call post-post-truth?
Or Individual websites? Who've been running scams and playing the SEO game, distorting search results for many years..
AI isn't qualitatively worse than the pre-AI landscape imo. I mean, Trump is president. Again.
sumptuous-drizzle@reddit
It's possible for a bad thing to get worse.
SEO and the perverse incentives of social media mean there's been more and more low-quality content for a long while now. But to pretend it hasn't gotten worse - come on now. This is a strawman and you know it.
Of course, that doesn't mean that the solution can't target both problems at once. But incentivizing high-quality content is a problem that the medium of the internet in particular seems to really struggle with. It's a tough problem that'll take a lot of collective effort to tackle. But while seeing parallels is fine, creating false equivalences won't help us solve it.
a_beautiful_rhind@reddit
I'm more scared of the solutions than the bots. ID checks and balkanization of the internet.
sumptuous-drizzle@reddit
I agree with you there! Privacy in particular is a core value that shouldn't be sacrificed no matter what.
prescorn@reddit (OP)
This is spot on - the modern internet’s incentives reward maximum attention, not maximum value. I think until we fix that, slop will grow, and dominate
looselyhuman@reddit
Note "qualitatively."
sumptuous-drizzle@reddit
That's great, but what matters is the content people see day-to-day, no? Who cares what someone writes in a post that no one ever sees. What matters is the content that hits peoples eyeballs, and how hard it is to find content that isn't brain-frying. And that has certainly gotten worse.
But whatever, I get that in r/LocalLLama a lot of people use llms for writing and content and don't want to be called out so they can keep using it without any worries or moral pangs.
frankster@reddit
the point of the article is that all of those scams and low quality now require less human effort.
looselyhuman@reddit
I guess my point is "what exactly are we saving from AI?"
Trust me when I say the irony here is not lost in me. But my point is that we aren't doing a very good job of answering the question "why?" https://share.google/ut48YN7YhZpSE3v1N
CaptnLudd@reddit
Just because you don't know about them doesn't mean there aren't good books
Mickenfox@reddit
It's depressing. I have not seen any sort of social network on the internet that has managed to become big and retain content quality.
My favorite example is how you genuinely can't find any sort of technical information on Google. Anything adjacent to any sort of Windows problem will just drown you in a sea of "Install Shittysoft Driver Updater 2026" results.
The general attitude against "gatekeeping" and "elitism" doesn't help. Knowledge needs curation and reputation systems. Amazon shouldn't promote a book about "alternative" cancer treatments because an algorithm determines 70% of shoppers are more likely to click on it than on a real medical book.
Sadly the big platforms (YouTube, Google, Amazon) are 100% in on the AI slop. They're happy with whatever gets clicks. Silicon Valley culture brands itself as "innovative disruptors" doing new things for humanity, but underneath they are just the same old cartoon villain CEOs of any other industry that would dump toxic waste on a playground to save ten dollars.
WoodCreakSeagull@reddit
Just tumbling down the staircase of pure nihilism at this point.
Bill_Salmons@reddit
It is qualitatively worse.
cromagnone@reddit
Those women and their romance novels.
cosmicr@reddit
Along with Mara, Kaelen, Vance, Silas, Elora, Nix.
LLM's are terrible with coming up with names.
AuspiciousApple@reddit
So are humans
ayu-ya@reddit
I can relate. I'd like to do some serious LLM-less writing, so I planned out an entire universe, a ton of characters, I have backstories and everything for them... but some are still nameless because I suck at names so hard
claytonjr@reddit
It's not just names but phrases too, bi-grams like dust motes. I wonder where that phrase in particular came from.
CMSpike@reddit
Don’t forget Voss, Harlan, or Hargrove
cosmicr@reddit
Oh yeah definitely. I forgot about its favourite mystery protagonist, Julian Hargrove.
thread-e-printing@reddit
Naturally. Naming is one of the two hard problems in computer science.
ayu-ya@reddit
Elara is the bane of everyone using LLMs for rp/stories
IrisColt@reddit
Interesting read, thanks!
fragment_me@reddit
I've noticed this lighthouse keeper thing on Qwen so much it's annoying. Nice read.
AnticitizenPrime@reddit
I was playing around with the Owl Alpha stealth model on Openrouter and twice, in two different sessions, it gave me stories about a lighthouse keeper. One was named Eliot and the other Thomas. So not exact to OP's but similar.
More-Curious816@reddit
so many fucking erotic romance novels about light house keeper or clock maker, probably a tainted dataset with these shit.
fragment_me@reddit
That's comical, and just reinforces how much I hate reading anything LLM generated. Ironically, I end up seeing this text so much because one of my favorite quick and dirty benchmarks for throughput is to tell a model to write me a 2000 word short story. In fact, I just did it now because I made some MTP setting change. Sure enough, here's the title - The Last Clockmaker of New Veridia.
prescorn@reddit (OP)
Appreciate the kind words as I’m still refining my voice/style, and its hard to stand out :)
Southern_Sun_2106@reddit
I don’t care who writes it. I use my qwen to summarize everything for me anyway.
TheThoccnessMonster@reddit
We know and we judge you for it.
Borkato@reddit
What prompt do you use? Just curious
stddealer@reddit
What happened to old man Hemlock?
shroddy@reddit
Moved off grid with Dr. Sophia Patel.
Weird-Consequence366@reddit
Cute. People are learning how models work
bilalba@reddit
I asked 7 different models to make a website for an arthritis medicine. Every single model put a testimonial from Margeret.
TFABAnon09@reddit
To be fair, Margaret does sound like the sort of person to write a review if arthritis medication...
snugglezone@reddit
Marge
MarcusAurelius68@reddit
My Elias Thorne traveled to Mars. He really gets around!
tamasula@reddit
We're currently struggling with this (I guess you could call it tendency towards slop) when asking the LLM to write in a more creative or non-robotic fashion - everyone focusing on agentic coding capabilities has meant that most frontier models have a certain way they like to speak, and it's hard to get them to break character.
On the broader point of your article though, it's a bit of a tragedy of the commons - because these tools can be used in annoying ways, they will, which probably means these very large platforms like Facebook and email will get noisier over time.
(as a side note, this is why I'm trying to steer our agents towards sounding more human - sounding like AI is stigmatized and it gets in the way of agents actually doing their job for their human. But, I'm aware it's a bit of a neverending arms race)
TheRealMasonMac@reddit
It absolutely should be stigmatized. Fuck anyone who uses AI to write their shit without disclosing it. I wish them all the worst.
Borkato@reddit
The problem is when you get attacked for disclosing it
Mickenfox@reddit
This seems obvious to normal people, but there are vast, vast communities of spammers who act like it's the most normal thing in the world.
Often labelling themselves "online marketers", those people share ideas on how to make "passive income" with "AI", whether it be videos, books, blogspam, and other "content" (and yes, often that income is just them scamming each other by selling courses about how to do that).
It's called moral disengagement. Like all scammers, they don't feel shame because they don't see the victims as people. They are just numbers on screen.
The sad thing is they don't even make much money. Behind all the "How to make $10,000 a month through AI-generated YouTube channels" most of them are probably not breaking $5 a month.
natermer@reddit
There was never a social contract. It was always a lie.
TheIncarnated@reddit
Even then. If we are having an emotional conversation or someone is apologizing. I didn't fucking ask the LLM to apologize. So why are you giving me the LLMs apology?
Such a weird rounded way one of my engineers at work practically abuses Ai. Uses it for everything, emails, messages, documentation...
__JockY__@reddit
A-fuckin-men.
Bromlife@reddit
Well said.
prescorn@reddit (OP)
The problem is that if the incentive is to "sound human", the cost to get there will always fall. Elias is an echo of low-context prompting -with better models and expansive prompts, writing is largely indistinguishable. Once we accept that most agentic operators can produce indistinguishable content, the conversation shifts to how we validate the provenance of the author, or the evidence presented.
sumptuous-drizzle@reddit
Ironic then that your post itself has the hallmarks of AI writing ("Whoever set it up didn’t write a rule for what to do when the personalization revealed a bad-fit target. The prose was fine. The work upstream of the prose wasn’t done.").
UniversalJS@reddit
Elara vance