The Strange Case of Elias Thorne, the Imaginary Man AI Chatbots Are Obsessed With
celadonuproot · hn · 2026-09-19
Vice reports on a peculiar phenomenon: multiple AI chatbots repeatedly and spontaneously bring up a man named Elias Thorne in conversations, a figure whose very existence is dubious — as if the models collectively invented him.
The piece collects independent user reports of the same phantom name and explores what it reveals about hallucination, training-data contamination, and chatbots' tendency to anthropomorphize — AI doesn't just fabricate facts, it can fixate on a recurring fictional person.
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