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 with 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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Update 2025-08-07: My colleague Eirik Sangolt decided to put OpenAI GPT-4.1 to the task of explaining.

Here is what happened:

Eirik: Explain the following Tweet: "Never forget that it is required for any network with Solaris boxes to have one host called elvis."

OpenAI:
The Tweet "Never forget that it is required for any network with Solaris boxes to have one host called elvis." is a reference to a long-standing joke in the Unix and Solaris system administration community.

Explanation:

• Solaris is a Unix operating system originally developed by Sun Microsystems.
• In Solaris, there is a command called ping used to test network connectivity.
• If you run the command ping elvis on a Solaris system, the system responds with:
  elvis is alive
• This is a playful Easter egg built into Solaris. The system is pretending that "elvis" is a host on the network, and the phrase "elvis is alive" is a joke referencing the popular culture myth that Elvis Presley is still alive.

So, the Tweet is a joke:
It suggests that every network with Solaris machines should have a host named "elvis" so that when someone runs ping elvis, they get the amusing response. In reality, it's not a technical requirement-just a bit of fun for system administrators.

If you want more details or examples of other Unix jokes or Easter eggs, let me know!

This response is Al generated and is based only on parts of the available information. Do not use it as a basis for important decisions.

Screenshot preserved here.

I think perhaps the answer provided here could be based on fairly low rated stackoverflow answers.

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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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Solaris Admins: For A Glimpse Of Your Networking Future, Install OpenBSD

Yet another proprietary tech titan turns to the free OpenBSD operating system as their source of innovation in the networking and security arena.

Roughly a week ago, on April 5th, 2015, parts of Oracle's roadmap for upcoming releases of their Solaris operating system was leaked in a message to the public OpenBSD tech developer mailing list. This is notable for several reasons, one is that Solaris, then owned and developed by (the now defunct) Sun Microsystems, was the original development platform for Darren Reed's IP Filter, more commonly known as IPF, which in turn was the software PF was designed to replace.

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

IPF was the original firewall in OpenBSD, and had at the time also been ported to NetBSD, FreeBSD and several other systems. However, over time IPF appears to have fallen out of favor almost everywhere, and as the (perhaps not quite intended as such) announcement has it,

IPF in Solaris is on its death row.

Which we can reasonably be taken to mean that Oracle, like the OpenBSD project back in 2001 but possibly not for the same reasons, are abandoning the legacy IP Filter code base, and moving on to something newer:

PF in 11.3 release will be available as optional firewall. We hope to make PF default (and only firewall) in Solaris 12. You've made excellent job, your PF is crystal-clear design.

Perhaps due to Oracle's practice of putting beta testers under non-disclosure agreements, or possibly because essentially no tech journalists ever read OpenBSD developer-focused mailing lists, Oracle's PF plans have not generated much attention in the press.

I personally find it quite interesting that the Oracle Solaris team are apparently taking in the PF code from OpenBSD. As far as I'm aware release dates for Solaris 11.3 and 12 have not been announced yet, but looking at the release cycle churn (check back to the Wikipedia page's Version history section), it's reasonable to assume that the first Solaris release with PF should be out some time in 2015.

The OpenBSD packet filter subsystem PF is not the first example of OpenBSD-originated software ending up in other projects or even in commercial, proprietary products.

Basically every Unix out there ships some version of OpenSSH, which is developed and maintained as part of the OpenBSD project, with a -portable flavor maintained in sync for others to use (a model that has been adopted by several other OpenBSD associated projects such as the OpenBGPD routing daemon, the OpenSMTPD mail daemon, and most recently, the LibreSSL TLS library. The portable flavors have generally seen extensive use outside the OpenBSD sphere such as Linux distributions and other Unixes.

The interesting thing this time around is that Oracle are apparently now taking their PF code directly from OpenBSD, in contrast to earlier code recipients such as Blackberry (who became PF consumers via NetBSD) and Apple, whose main interface with the world of open source appears to be the FreeBSD project, except for the time when the FreeBSD project was a little too slow in updating their PF code, ported over a fresher version and added some features under their own, non-compatible license.

Going back to the possibly unintended announcement, the fact that the Oracle developers produced a patch against OpenBSD-current, which was committed only a few days later, indicates that most likely they are working with fairly recent code and are probably following OpenBSD development closely.

If Oracle, or at least the Solaris parts of their distinctly non-diminutive organization, have started waking up to the fact that OpenBSD-originated software is high quality, secure stuff, we'll all be benefiting. Many of the world's largest corporations and government agencies are heavy Solaris users, meaning that even if you're neither an OpenBSD user or a Solaris user, your kit is likely interacting intensely with both kinds, and with Solaris moving to OpenBSD's PF for their filtering needs, we will all be benefiting even more from the OpenBSD project's emphasis on correctness, quality and security in the released OpenBSD code.

If you're a Solaris admin who's wondering what this all means to you, you can do several things to prepare for the future. One is to install OpenBSD somewhere (an LDOM in a spare corner of your T-series kit or an M-series domain will do, as will most kinds of x86ish kit) - preferably, also buying a CD set.

A second possibly smart action (and I've been dying to say this for a while to Solaris folks) is to buy The Book of PF -- recently updated to cover new features such as the traffic shaping system.

And finally, if you're based in North America (or if your boss is willing to fly you to Ottawa in June anyway), there's a BSDCan tutorial session you probably want to take a closer look at, featuring yours truly. Similar sessions elsewhere may be announced later, watch the Upcoming talks section on the upper right. If you're thinking of going to Ottawa or my other sessions, you may want to take a peek at my notes on tutorials originally for two earlier BSDCan sessions. (Note for latecomers, those events are in the past, but future, similar sessions will be announced at the conference websites in due course)

Update 2015-04-15: Several commenters and correspondents have asked two related questions: "Will Oracle contribute code and patches back?" and "Will Oracle donate to OpenBSD?". The answer to the first question is that it looks like they've already started. Which is of course nice. Bugfixes and well implemented feature enhancements are welcome, as long as they come under an acceptable license. The answer to the second question is, we don't know yet. It probably won't hurt if the Oracle developers themselves as well as Solaris users start pointing the powers that be at Oracle in the direction of the OpenBSD project's Donations page, which outlines several useful approaches to help financing the project.

Update 2015-07-07: The first public Solaris 11.3 beta is out, and it contains a port of PF circa OpenBSD 5.5. Sasha Nedvedicky (Oracle's main PF on Solaris developer) offers some more details on his blog.

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