When you ask ChatGPT "Tell me a story" it's always is about a girl named Elara

Just tried it out a few times. It seems that the old gpt4 model strongly prefers telling story about "Elara" - but only if asked in English to "tell me a story".

Prompting gpt4 in German or the current gpt4o in English leads to stories with many different protagonists.

Re: When you ask ChatGPT "Tell me a story" it's always is about a girl named Elara

#7

Post by rahidz » Sat, Nov 09, 2024, 10:06 AM UTC

What causes this? Did one of the model trainers write a story about a girl named Elara as an example response to "tell me a story" or something?

Re: When you ask ChatGPT "Tell me a story" it's always is about a girl named Elara

#8

Post by hrkucuk » Sat, Nov 09, 2024, 10:13 AM UTC

From [1] : > Since 2013, the name Elara’s popularity has risen consistently. It peaked in 2018 when 175 babies per million were given the name.

I wonder if the most recent data from internet that ended up in the training data makes chatgpt lean towards randomly picking that name. [1] https://www.momjunction.com/baby-names/elara/#popularity-ove...

Re: When you ask ChatGPT "Tell me a story" it's always is about a girl named Elara

#9

Post by fny » Sat, Nov 09, 2024, 10:16 AM UTC

In time, this quirk and others* will disappear.

I’ve recently wondered whether it makes more sense to have AIs teach more at home and have classrooms evaluate more.

Another thought is that people will still need knowledge to interact with an LLM in any meaningful way. It’s akin to doing research with a brilliant professor: an illiterate partner will have no idea even what to ask.

*If you repeatedly prompt an LLM to “Make a sentence using the verb V in tense T in language L” with zero context, the example sentences are surprisingly related for a single verb.

For example, “You must do your homework tonight”; “He must do his homework to pass the test”; “They must do their homework tonight”.

Re: When you ask ChatGPT "Tell me a story" it's always is about a girl named Elara

#10

Post by amelius » Sat, Nov 09, 2024, 10:17 AM UTC

Guessing. I think they may have trained on copyrighted stories. So what they supposedly did was ask an llm to replace the names of the main characters. Since Elara is not a frequently used name, there is little chance of clashing. Then they trained chatgpt on those stories.