Elias in the Lighthouse, Again? Diagnosing Low Diversity in LLM Stories

In three linesStudy of 20,000 stories from 4 LLMs: 11 words (Elias, Mara, Elara, lighthouse, clockmaker, librarian) appear in 88.3% of generated narratives. These tokens originate from preference data used during alignment, not training data. Reveals disproportionate impact of small datasets combined with powerful alignment algorithms.

Summary generated by Claude — human-verified