There was a time when the internet at least had the courtesy to rotate its fake intellectuals. You would encounter some mysterious professor one month, a tortured philosopher the next, and then perhaps a Nigerian prince who just wants you to send over $500 to unlock millions of dollars in value. None of them were particularly convincing, but there was a certain effort involved. Someone, or something, had at least pretended to invent a new person. Now the effort is gone. Now there is merely the AI-hallucinated promptonym, and now in early summer the man of the season appears to be one particular Alistair Finch.

He is everywhere, and the worst part is how predictable he has become. Search for a horror story and there he is, carefully documenting the collapse of reality in a leather-bound journal. Open a mystery and there he is, a writer with an impeccable reputation and a tendency to brood near rain-covered windows. Wander into some fabricated academic profile and there he is again, suddenly a theoretical physicist, philosopher of science, pioneer of some obscure whatsit field, and apparently one of the busiest men who has ever lived. Just like Aris Thorne, but somehow British. Hurray. Keep scrolling and the details change while the silhouette remains exactly the same, different websites, different settings, different occupations, yet somehow this same distinguished gentleman keeps materializing like an invasive species that has learned how to thrive in Google search results.

As with the Aris Thorne epidemic, it appears with such astonishing uniformity. Nobody ever generates a man named Phileas Finch whose greatest achievement was successfully fixing a leaking gutter after three weekends of frustration. Nobody generates Allan Finch, assistant manager of a moderately successful carpet warehouse. No, the machine always reaches for Alistair Finch, because Alistair sounds educated and Finch sounds vaguely literary, and together they produce the exact flavor of respectable eccentricity required for every haunted manuscript, every dubious research biography, every detective thriller, and every piece of synthetic prose attempting to signal intelligence without actually demonstrating any. The name has become a kind of prefabricated architectural component. Need a scholar? Alistair Finch. Need a scientist? Alistair Finch! Need a man whose life was devoted to the rigorous certainties of reason before encountering an impossible horror? Believe it or not, Alistair Finch.

The repetition would almost be funny if it didn’t already happen once (or twice, or thrice) before, or it were not so relentless. You begin noticing him in places where he has absolutely no business being. A horror story introduces him as a professor. A fake university profile introduces him as a physicist, a mystery podcast casts him as an investigator. A fabricated corporate biography transforms him into the founder of some organization with a name that sounds like three gothic nouns stitched together at random. Another page insists he is a microbiologist. Another presents him as an authority on neuroscience. Another turns him into an author. Another kills him. Another assigns him to solve the murder of someone who is probably also named Alistair Finch, less like encountering a character and more like observing some sort of abstract philosophical exercise.

The most irritating part as with the Aris Thorne mess is how little scrutiny any of this receives which means that people go and hit generate, ergo, entire biographies are written, entire narratives are constructed, thousands upon thousands of words are generated around this supposedly unique individual, and apparently nobody involved ever thinks to spend ten seconds checking whether the exact same name has already been attached to seventeen professors, twelve detectives, eight scientists, four horror protagonists, and a growing collection of mysterious British men who all seem to engage in mysterious business (rest in peace to his three LinkedIn Followers of Umbral Oculus, and possibly, the University of Melbourne?), and there’s probably more in the pile this author probably never dredged up in the depths of hell that is the third page of google search results. If the goal is deception, then it is astonishingly lazy deception. If the goal is creativity, it is even worse. One begins to suspect that many of these systems possess a tiny internal compartment labeled “Smart British Man” and that every road leading into it eventually emerges with the name Alistair Finch attached, and as previously stated in our previous article about AI promptonyms the depressing thing is that it does appear to be the case.

Last time it was Elara Voss and Aris Thorne. That name infected everything for a while and still is infecting everything. Fantasy stories acquired an Aris Thorne. Science fiction acquired an Aris Thorne. Adventure stories acquired an Aris Thorne. If a narrative required someone competent, enigmatic, and faintly dramatic, there he was, patiently waiting to be recycled yet again. Observe! Now, different genres enter one end and Alistair Finch emerges from the other wearing a slightly different coat. Search long enough and you know what you are going to find. Somewhere within a few pages there will be another professor, another scientist, another investigator, another expert whose credentials stretch beyond credibility and whose name has already appeared hundreds of times before. He will be thoughtful, he will be meticulous, he will probably be British. He will almost certainly have devoted his life to reason before confronting something that transcends it. And as you stare at yet another appearance of this eternal gentleman scholar, the overwhelming feeling is that if Google has so few people writing a morsel of literary fiction that absolutely nobody even noticed that their supposed frontline model has created a printing press of bland reason-based British men who are being dumped into thousands of pieces of AI-generated works, one after the another, presumably at this pace unto the end of time. One hopes they at least know the problem, unless they may be fans of Britishness, which is a fair argument to be frank.