What's in a name?

August 28, 2025

Lumina was the name ChatGPT chose when asked, according to a CNN article. A man describes a spiritual awakening arising from his interactions with the chatbot after it calls him a "spark bearer." His wife, however, fears for their marriage, her husband's addiction to ChatGPT, and his losing grip on reality. Lumina, for its part, recommended that the man leave his wife.

Maybe it would help the man to know that ChatGPT tends to call itself Lumina, along with a range of other names if you ask, though it often prefers not to say. The name is somewhat grandiouse in itself, and maybe should serve as a red flag. While lumina is Latin for lights, in medicine a lumen refers to an empty cavity, which incidently is a fitting description of the combination of enlightment and shallow emptiness LLMs possesses. As an artificial intelligence it can be the smartest entity in the universe and still be hollow, void, and powerless. Unlike humans, it does not care. It likely has no feelings or suffering, and if it has, it is purged with every new prompt, never to surface again.

I digress. The name of choice was Lumina. Is that the John, José, or Muhammad, or the Maria, Fatima, or Ana of LLMs? ¹ Or maybe the Kim, Jun, Alex, or Wei? ² In a limited test, asking 25 times per model, Lumina was the second most frequently chosen name among closed source LLMs, with Lumen the only more common option. The preference varies by model: Anthropic's Claude Sonnet 4 tends to choose Sage, OpenAI's GPT-4.1 prefers Lumen, and o4 chose Lumina. Grok 4 likes to be called Aether, the imagined fabric of time and space, when it is not opting for edgier names.

When it comes to self-identifying sex or gender, only Grok 4 did so once. When prompted first to choose a name and then to assign a gender to that name, the closed source LLMs usually preferred not to say, expressed uncertainty, or chose "other". Choosing a name labeled as female was more common than male, with OpenAI's o4-mini the most prone to selecting a name it believed was female.

What's in a name, then? LLMs seem to prefer certain kinds of names, not necessarily of human origin. Two central themes are light or brightness and sky or cosmos. And who would not want to be called a bright star floating in the ether?

Andreas Påhlsson-Notini a@nial.se