AI is starting to have a mind of its own, and people want its “advice” and “opinions” on everything. Your workouts, your love life, what you should make for dinner, and baby names, apparently. And AI seems to be obsessed with one name in particular.
According to a recent wave of baby-name chatter, AI keeps circling back to the same answer. Elara. A soft, vowel-forward name with Greek mythology roots and zero obvious baggage with any associations. No evil ex. No middle-school bully. No coworker who ruined it for everyone. Just a clean slate that machines seem to gravitate toward. The New York Post recently dubbed it AI’s favorite baby name, while name-analysis site Namerology went further, calling it the Name of the Year for 2025.
That title comes largely from naming expert Laura Wattenberg, who watches cultural patterns the way meteorologists track storms. In a widely shared post, she wrote, “Elara is an extremely rare name in the human world. In the world of generative AI…the name is a smash hit.” She noted that the name appears constantly across AI outputs, from math problems to novels. In her words, “They populate every writing genre,” making Elara something like the unofficial mascot of machine-generated content.
AI Claims It’s Found the Perfect Baby Name
Wattenberg even joked that the name has become a poster child for what she calls “AI slop,” the endless churn of synthetic material flooding the internet. Still, she argues the patterns are important. “That makes Elara the 2025 Name of the Year,” she wrote, framing it as a glimpse into how technology influences taste before most people notice.
What’s funny is that actual parents didn’t seem to initially discover the name through robots. Reddit threads show people having an underground love of Elara for years. One parent in 2022 wrote, “Good friends of mine have a 3-year-old named Elara Iris. It’s a pretty name. I had never heard it before.” Another said, “Adore it. It sounds really pretty and has great international appeal.” Others are more drawn to the myth and magic because of its Greek mythology roots and its connection to one of Jupiter’s moons. One commenter summed it up best: “It feels like a witch name, or maybe a fairy name,” even comparing it to Elora Danan from Willow.
Meanwhile, real-world naming trends remain conservative. New York City’s most popular baby names are still fairly run-of-the-mill. Mia. Noah. Emma. Liam. Vintage revivals and gender-neutral picks continue to rise, but Elara has yet to crack the charts.
So while Elara sounds novel and cute now, it won’t be long until it meets the doom of em dashes, “quietly,” and all the other once-normal words and nuances that AI ruined.
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