The Ghost Couple: Correlated LLM Name Priors and Their Haunting of the Web and Academic Publishing
These names do not exist. Elena Vasquez and Marcus Chen have appeared as volcano experts, astronauts, thriller protagonists, podcast hosts, and academic co-authors across hundreds of independently produced AI-generated documents, never having lived. We show that large language models do not merely default to high-probability individual names when generating fictional experts: they produce correlated character ensembles, pairs and trios whose co-occurrence rates far exceed chance and are consistent across independent generations. These priors are model-family-specific (Claude: Elena Vasquez + Marcus Chen + Amara Okafor; Gemini: Aris Thorne + Lena Petrova; GPT: Elara Voss with no fixed part...
| Authors | Michał Brzozowski, Neo Christopher Chung |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.DL |
| Published | 1 June 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 29 July 2026 |
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