Artificial intelligence can now generate bedtime stories, draft lesson plans and conjure photo-realistic images of people who do not exist. It has also, apparently, suggested the perfect new baby name.
That name is Elara, according to Laura Wattenberg, an authority on naming who tracks patterns, data and cultural shifts. She recently anointed the name the 2025 Name of the Year in a blog post.
Wattenberg tells TODAY.com the choice grew out of a trend she began noticing across AI-generated writing, where the same name appeared again and again, regardless of genre or audience.
“The AIs love to create characters named Elara,” Wattenberg explains. The name surfaces in science fiction and fantasy, she notes, but also in far more mundane places.
“You’ll even find math workbooks about Elara’s adventures in geometry,” Wattenberg says. “No matter the context, no matter the genre, this is the name that the AI chatbots love.”
Wattenberg isn’t the only one who has noticed. There are numerous threads on Reddit about the uncommon name. “Every time I try using any models for creative writing, doesn’t matter whether it’s gpt-4, mistral, llama, etc, always the same names come up like Elara,” one person wrote on Reddit. Several Reddit users pointed out that her last name is often “Vex.”
In a LinkedIn post, Abram Jackson, an artificial intelligence researcher at Microsoft, explored why Elara recurs so frequently in AI-generated writing and traced it to associations in a model’s training data, including references to the video game World of Warcraft.
Wattenberg offered a simpler explanation, rooted less in code.
“The AIs are trained on human-generated content, and then they’re trained to please us,” she explains. “They try their hardest to give us exactly what we want.”
In that sense, she adds, Elara has the right sounds and softness, and no built-in associations to turn people off.
“Because none of us have ever actually met a person named Elara, it has no baggage,” she says. “We don’t have an Elara we hate.”
That blankness, Wattenberg says, is why the name keeps appearing in AI-generated writing and has begun catching teachers’ attention.
She pointed to one teacher who said the name had begun popping up so often in student work that it became a dead giveaway AI was used. The teacher eventually added a line to the fine print of an assignment: If the main character was named Elara, the student would lose 99 points.
In Greek mythology, Elara was a lover of Zeus. The name is of Greek origin and means “hazelnut” or “spear,” according to Nameberry. Elara has never cracked the top 1,000 baby names in the United States, but Wattenberg says the name has all the ingredients to catch on.
“It’s a perfectly smooth, very vowel-forward name. It kind of rolls off the tongue,” she says. “And if you look at the names that are around us today, that’s what we like— Luna and Liam, Mia and Mila, Emma and Noah. Elara is the sound of our time.”
