Tim and Elara

On the default imagination

Twenty-one percent of all stories in the TinyStories dataset are about a character named Tim.

Let that settle for a moment. TinyStories is a corpus of roughly two million short narratives generated by GPT-3.5 and GPT-4, designed to train small language models on the mechanics of simple storytelling. The dataset was supposed to teach machines what a story is. What the machine apparently believes a story is: Tim goes to the park. Tim learns something. Tim has a friend named Lily. One in five times, the protagonist's name is Tim. Not distributed across a realistic spread of names — not even the names most common in the English-speaking world — but Tim, with a frequency that suggests a system in love with its own default.

Lynn Cherny found this. She linked it with a note and a winking emoji and the line that is already a kind of title: The Big Finding: 21% of All Stories Are About "Tim."

Separately, Cherny was testing someone's new AI storyboard tool and discovered that it had named her female protagonist "Elara."

Elara is not a name many people have. It is, however, a name many AI systems generate — a blend of Elena and Clara with a suffix borrowed from high fantasy, just specific enough to feel intentional, just generic enough to feel like no one's actual childhood. The AI thinks it is being creative when it produces "Elara." It is producing its own statistical mode. It is making Tim a woman and sending her to the Shire.

Matthew Kirschenbaum, whose essay on something about modernity is currently in copy edits, posted the abstract and then added: It's not just higher ed though. It's <waves hands> everything. This is modernity. He didn't quote the abstract. He posted an image of it. The specific claim lives behind a layer of indirection, the way specific claims often do now — screenshot, not text; gesture, not argument. The wave of hands. Everything, everywhere, apparently.

Andrew Plotkin was at GDC. Attendance: 20,000, down from 30,000 the year before. He noted it was "very obvious from floor level once the expo hall opened." He has had "an entire career in game dev" since the last time he saw a friend who was also there. The floor was a third emptier and he could feel it in his feet.

What connects these: a field that spent thirty years building toward the idea that computers could generate surprising, strange, genuinely interesting narrative — and now discovers the statistical interior of that promise. The machine imagines Tim. It imagines Elara. It imagines them with a fidelity that is, in the end, a fidelity to the center of the distribution, the most averaged version of what a character might be called, the name that sounds like a name without being anyone's name in particular.

The e-lit and interactive fiction community was always arguing, against the skeptics, that procedurally generated text could be weird and alive and worth reading. Twine games. Parser fiction. Generative poetry with actual teeth. The argument was that the machine, guided by a thoughtful author, could surprise you.

The machine, on its own, calls the protagonist Tim.

Kirschenbaum is right: it's not just higher ed. It's the whole situation. The imagination, scaled up, discovers its favorite name, and the name is Tim. The game developer's conference has thirty percent fewer bodies in it. The storyboard software offers you Elara and considers the matter closed.

The philosopher Jacques Derrida — the philosopher — would have been delighted by this. He spent a career on the violence of the name. He did not anticipate Tim.