Mode collapse has a name, and he's selling cancer treatment advice on Amazon (opens in new tab)

(danielmay.co.uk)

24 pointsdanielrmay9d ago4 comments

4 comments

Pretty interesting that this is still a thing. Five years ago, people noticed that there were a bunch of recurring characters in AI Dungeon:

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".

drcongo9d ago

I don't know why your sibling comment is getting downvoted to hell, I thought it was an interesting read.

tom_9d ago

I assume it's because the article appears to be, if not AI slop, then certainly something that reads very much like it has gone all the way through an LLM's digestive tract and come out the other end. Perhaps the odd piece of sweetcorn or pepper seed can be found, but I for one would prefer to dine elsewhere.

I vouched for the sibling comment, which seemed innocuous and contained (I felt) the most interesting part.

danielrmayOP9d ago

I wrote this article earlier this week and it attempts to describe the change we're seeing on the internet with the advance of cheap agentic content.

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.

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