So... Garth01 called me here, so first of all, thanks for the vote of confidence, buddy! I don't know if I'm as experienced as you all think but I try my best! 😅

Anyways, about names and why some like the ones repeat a lot. If you are talking about a generator that does not uses the ai-text-plugin like this one, you'll see on the edit side of things that the names are fixed, passed literally as an array of names as you mentioned:

However, in the case of generators using the ai-text-plugin like ACC when coming up with new characters, or others that write you a long character sheet from a simple input to then make an image or whatnot, that's because of the training data.

To put it simply, all models require data to work as intended, and depending on such data, it can generate bias. For example, in a random test using the Prompt Tester, you can see this:

You may recognize some of these names depending on what model you use, since as you can see in the prompt, the only "context" given to produce the names is "is for a story". Changing the context changes the result, as for example, if the context is South America, the model favors "Carlos" or "Maria", while if the context is Russia, you'll see it producing "Boris" and "Petrova" often. Note that this is independent of what is the most common name of the region, as the bias is dependent on the training data, which none of us knows what it contains.

It's the same effect as how the model decides to handle certain situations, for example, if you let it chose the weather, it will pick rain because it has bias towards it. If you let it pick a random encounter against a wild animal, a boar will be more likely. It is not that the model does not recognizes the name, it is just that it has no priority compared to others. Another example would be that even with proper context, you will be extremely unlikely (or even never) get the model to randomly give you the name "Petronilda", but it recognizes it, as if you ask it about the name, it will give you excruciating detail about its etymology, origin and all.

Contrast to the older model, the new one has more options and is more "creative" as Garth01 mentions. Something many would remember from the old model is that Elara Castellanos and Charles McAllister were omnipresent on all stories to the point that if you dig on the code of some generators such as AI Chat, you'll see how those were hard banned in the code itself. Then again "more creative" still holds a lot of bias.

Personally, naming is one of the things I don't let the model pick, because while the new model has more range, it is still limited for many standards and trying to make it "more creative" is a headache that i simply not worth it. Something I did in the past when the old model tried to place a name that was repeated already, was to just change it to something obtained from the Fantasy Name Generator (not by Perchance, this is a third party free service) which contains a large database for pretty much every context you may need.

Hope that helps!