Beneath the Exhibition and "Elara Voss"

Competitions
,
1

Continuing the discussion from Draconic TALJ26 Reviews:

I was reading the game review thread and my interest was piqued by the mention of an “Elara Voss” character in the game called Beneath the Exhibition. For those who don’t know, Elara Voss is a name that very frequently shows up in AI-generated content. Here’s an article about it, and if you just look up the name you’ll find plenty of other examples. Including, hilariously, this author website for an Elara Voss who writes steamy romance novels.

I couldn’t find any other thread on this forum that mentioned it, so I thought I’d bring it up here. The Text Adventure Literacy Jam allows AI for brainstorming and image generation, though it forbids AI usage for direct writing of code or text. So it is possible that the author used AI for brainstorming, and it came up with this name. I did look through the start of the game and I found nothing egregrious, though the writing uses an unusual mixture of em dashes and normal dashes.

I don’t really believe in playing AI detective, as it can easily become toxic, but AI writing quirks bother me, so I wonder what other people think about this.

1 Like
2

Of course, it’s also possible that the author was aware of the ubiquity of the name “Elara Voss” in AI-generated stories and included it intentionally as a joke, shout-out or Easter egg. I don’t think there’s much to be gained from speculating, especially since, as you point out, AI-assisted brainstorming is allowed anyway, so there’s no question of wrongdoing.

1 Like
3

Yeah, I will say, I didn’t get any LLM vibes from the writing or gameplay (at least as far as I got). It felt very much like someone’s first game and ran into new-author pitfalls, not AI ones.

So I’d bet on either a brainstorming suggestion or a deliberate joke.

2 Likes
4

Sure, I don’t want to stir up any drama or anything. In the future I’ll err on the side of caution. Sorry if I ruffled any feathers.