I was watching some videos to unwind before bedtime last night, and the following ad popped up. I normally would have skipped it, but something about it piqued my curiosity and, since it was less than 3 minutes, I decided to let it play.
I was not disappointed.
The simple, man-of-the-soil pitchbot explained that he had been working for an inexplicably wealthy farmer who claimed that the secret of his success was a system that had allowed him to win the lottery multiple times using AI. The implausibility of the pitch would have been enough to hold my interest, but it got better. The genius behind this amazing AI was a scientist named Dr. Leonard Voss.
Readers of the blog and students of generative AI esoterica will remember Elara Voss:
What’s so odd about this is that--for a name now so common across the megaplatforms--before 2023, “Elara Voss” did not exist. There is no person named Elara Voss in the United States. No birth certificate has ever been issued under that name; if you search for it in public records databases, you’ll turn up no results. There aren’t even any characters named “Elara Voss” in any book published before 2023. Until two years ago, the two words didn’t ever appear next to each other even by accident.
But if you direct almost any L.L.M. to generate a sci-fi story or narrative for you, it will name the main character “Elara Voss”--or a similar variation like “Elara Vex,” “Elena Voss,” or “Elias Vance”--with an alarming degree of frequency.
I can't say for certain that Dr. Leonard Voss is an ancestor of Elena's, but a quick Google search did show him popping up in similar roles. Perhaps some future LLM-generated novel will reveal that the Voss family dynasty was built on Powerball winnings.
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