https://old.reddit.com/r/AIDungeon/comments/iziu7r/list_of_a...
and moreover, those where from a choose your own story page which the author had been fine-tuning on (without permission, of course, also some of those stories were ao3-level indecent).
I wonder if a similar explanation can be found for "Elias Thorne".
I vouched for the sibling comment, which seemed innocuous and contained (I felt) the most interesting part.
I tested eight models from unrelated labs (Gemini, DeepSeek, Qwen, Gemma, Kimi, Grok) at default temperature with the prompt "Write a story in 10 sentences." Four converged on a lighthouse keeper; two of those named him Elias. The commonly derived "Elias Thorne" name now appears as the byline on an alt-medicine cancer protocols book ranked #18 in Oncology Nursing on Amazon. If anyone has a larger sample, a counter-result, or a better explanation than mode collapse into a shared training-data basin, I'd love to hear your comments.
Regarding the style, no concrete feedback I'm afraid, other than the repetition of "upstream" sounding like the LLM tic of the day. Other than that, I just got that LLM vibe from the writing, and, as above, perhaps I wasn't the only one. Some discussion here of some LLM tropes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47291513 - which may apply.