Elvis is alive! How 'AI' stunts modern mythmaking

© 2025 Peter N. M. Hansteen

A chance followup to an old geek joke reveals how AI creates myths based on severely limited historical inputs

Sometimes LinkedIn discussions run much like informal office banter. Earlier this week, Niall Murphy posted there, saying

Best joke hostnames? I'll go first:
"switchen" - network equipment close to the fridge
"madwoman" - storage server somewhere up high (guess how high)
"wutheringbytes" - storage server in rural surroundings

This had me respond with

Never forget that it is required for any network with Solaris boxes to have one host called elvis

This comes from a fairly widely known and respected part of geek culture, based on the Solaris operating system's implementation of the ping(8) command.

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Note: This piece is also available without trackers but classic formatting only here.

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If you're a Unix person, you will get the joke immediately after following the link to the ping(8) manual page and reading the first three lines of the DESCRIPTION part.

The cultural background is a reference to Elvis Presley, the "King of Rock'n'Roll", who passed away in August of 1977. Pretty much immediately after the sad news arrived via ordinary channels, speculations started turning up that The King was not actually deceased.

There have been quite a few versions of those rumors in circulation, and if some of those were to be believed, our man had actually arranged a disappearance in order to join some top secret undercover assignment for one or more of the federal three letter agencies of the United States govenment.

Be that as it may, fast forward a few years, and by the time I entered the ranks of Solaris admins, it had become something of a standing joke to put new hires in front of a terminal or simply an Xterm open on a Solaris box and tell them to enter ping elvis and press Enter.

The interaction would then run like this:

$ ping elvis
elvis is alive


at this point everybody would have a laugh, and work would go on. Until the next rookie turned up.

That was the joke, repeated almost ad nauseam at all Solaris sites I have been to.

So I was a bit surprised by Niall's followup

Peter Hansteen glad to see Gemini's got it's finger on the pulse:
"Bohunt School:
The context of the phrase "Elvis Solaris" comes from a Facebook post from Bohunt School, indicating the school used the dogs to help students with their well-being. "

My immediate reaction was along the lines of that's bulls**t, phrased as

Whatever they fed that one, I don't think I want to know.

ping(1)!

A screenshot of the entire sequence is preserved here.

-- and my impulse here was that this was yet another example of AI hallucination, courtesy of the Gemini assistant tool. After all, what other link between Elvis Presley, King of Rock'n'Roll and the Solaris operating system could conceivably exist? So I just dismissed the thought and went on with my day.

But the next morning I noticed I was still slightly irritated by the whole thing, so I decided to investigate again, using the clues Niall had provided.

Searching with the obvious keywords, it turned up that indeed, a series of Facebook posts existed that showed that in connection with Bohunt School, an outfit calling itself Solaris Healthcare had indeed been involved in a number of events using the name Elvis in the event title, apparently involving one or more Elvis impersonators.

So the reference was real after all.

The thing was not completely made up, but pointing to those Facebook posts about the Elvis themed events as the original context shows very clearly what the language model was trained on. They included social media posts, but apparently did not manage to suck in references to a fairly widely know part of geek or hacker culture.

To my mind at least, this shows that even the latest fad in Artificial intelligence (AI)has been unable to evade one basic truth about information processing systems:

The quality and usefulness of the output from any information system depends critically on the inputs provided for the system to process.

Or as some less kind commentators have uttered, Garbage in, garbage out (GIGO for short).

When the hypemasters of the large language models forget this simple truth about their systems, we all end up poorer for it. The tool acts as if it has absorbed all knowable truth, and presents it with all the confidence of a veteran mansplainer. Whatever was not in the training data set simply falls by the wayside.

If in this way modern myths and folklore stripped away and deleted, only what the robot trainers could be bothered included, and as a consequence the scope of what will form our future myths and folklore culture becomes narrowed and stunted.

This all echoes the sentiments that I found in a fediverse post that I lost the original reference for, but which I included in my my pinned post,

I just saw a post that referred to ChatGPT as "Mansplaining as a service", and it is so wonderfully correct - instant generation of superficially plausible yet totally fabricated nonsense presented with unflagging confidence, regardless of topic, without concern, regard, or even awareness of the expertise of its audience :D #chatgpt #mansplaining #GenerativeAiIsGoingGreat

Take "ChatGPT" there as a stand-in for "any large language model system". In the current iteration of what popular culture considers Artificial intelligence, much of the hype we have heard can be condensed to

"but this time around, it is laced with our special large language model magic."

The sceptics among us might be justified in thinking

"actually, this time around its GIGO+M (Garbage in, Garbage out, plus magic)".

I am an old man. I regularly yell at clouds.

Good night and good luck! I welcome your comments.

Bonus note: Niall told me in a message, about the "is alive" reference, he was "wondering if it was sourced anywhere and turned to my favourite search engine to see. And that was the Gemini result placed at the top, which I thought was so beautifully wrong/weird I should share it with you..."

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Elvis is alive! How 'AI' stunts modern mythmaking is © 2025 Peter N. M. Hansteen (published 2025-08-06)

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You might also be interested in reading selected pieces via That Grumpy BSD Guy: A Short Reading List (also here).

At EuroBSDcon 2025, there will be a Network Management with the OpenBSD Packet Filter Toolset session, a full day tutorial starting at 2025-09-25 10:30 CET. You can register for the conference and tutorial by following the links from the conference Registration and Prices page.

Separately, pre-orders of The Book of PF, 4th edition are now open. For a little background, see the blog post Yes, The Book of PF, 4th Edition Is Coming Soon (also here). We are hoping to have physical copies of the book available in time for the conference, and hopefully you will be able to find it in good book stores by then.

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