AI RESEARCH
The Ghost Couple: Correlated LLM Name Priors and Their Haunting of the Web and Academic Publishing
arXiv CS.LG
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ArXi:2606.02184v1 Announce Type: cross 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.