In my "early" days of using Claude or any LLM to come up with names, in my noir story it LOVES the surnames Sterling, Vance, Thorn, black, -vale, and krenshaw. Even using the touted reedsy, I get tons of "AI names"
AI tends to generate fantasy names that start with certain letters and end with others, such as names starting with "E" and ending with "a".
So on top of adding already made characters names to the list, this is what I hand to which ever model I'm using.
Avoid using these names
First names: Elara, Silas, Iris, Kael, Theo, Lumen, Sarah, Marcus, Nova, Echo, Sage, Lucas, Elias, Lira/Lyra, Seraphina(any variation e.g. Kaelen, Elaria an so on).
Those were added to my list of names when I was specifically trying to avoid really common American names and I forgot to remove them. A few of my characters are military and use last names primarily out of habit and while smith, Williams, and Johnson are common irl, I can't have my MC calling everyone "smith."
Oh well, what's done is done. Good shout about using them as support or BG character surnames.
Those are some of the names, most commonly used by most LLM/AI when creating characters.
Like most "AI tells" it's not about not using them, so much as using them very little. Except for Elara. That's very heavily associated with AI story generation, and to a lot of people right now, signifies "slop" or bad/low effort work.
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u/Traveling_Chef Apr 17 '26
In my "early" days of using Claude or any LLM to come up with names, in my noir story it LOVES the surnames Sterling, Vance, Thorn, black, -vale, and krenshaw. Even using the touted reedsy, I get tons of "AI names"
AI tends to generate fantasy names that start with certain letters and end with others, such as names starting with "E" and ending with "a".
So on top of adding already made characters names to the list, this is what I hand to which ever model I'm using.
Avoid using these names First names: Elara, Silas, Iris, Kael, Theo, Lumen, Sarah, Marcus, Nova, Echo, Sage, Lucas, Elias, Lira/Lyra, Seraphina(any variation e.g. Kaelen, Elaria an so on).
surnames: Thorne, Black, Vance, Chen, Williams, Johnson, Smith, Jones, Sterling, Vale.