Get to Know the People Who Write Custom Fiction with Chatbots – Petra Ferraz de Novaes is most likely engrossed in a fantasy created using artificial intelligence when she’s not working.
Brazilian software developer Novaes, 36, has always had a passion for narrative. However, it seemed impossible to make every single choice that goes into it, from character development to style and grammar. She therefore asked an AI model to realize one of her concepts in 2024.
The strange, perhaps erratic interpretations of her cues, which took the story in unexpected areas, pleased Novaes. “I find the unpredictability fascinating,” Novaes says to WIRED. People claim that AI frequently has hallucinations. However, it’s probably what you want in this instance.
These days, Novaes uses an application called SillyTavern to run open-source models on her PC, spending hours at a time creating stories with AI. She sketches up an idea—for instance, an elven warrior fights the Amazonian queen and takes her throne—and observes the model fill in the details.
Novaes moves across several fantastical worlds in a single session. She like Star Wars, Pokémon, and Mass Effect, and she steals some of them. Novaes occasionally creates self-contained narratives that are as long as a short novel and may post them online. She takes part in private role-plays otherwise. It might never end. You discover a task, finish it, and go on to the next one, explains Novaes. “Your imagination is the limit.”
A recent study found that many people share Novaes’ pastime. Melanie Walsh, an assistant professor at the University of Washington Information School who coauthored the study, said, “They know [the stories] are produced by an AI model, and they don’t care.” “That actually appears to be a major component of the appeal.”
A number of scandals concerning the alleged usage of AI by professional authors have recently plagued the publishing industry. A $2 million book agreement was canceled by one publisher, a novel was taken off the shelves by another, and fans claimed that an AI-generated short tale had won a prize. The assumption that no one wants to read stories created by machines—that utilizing AI to create fiction diminishes the art form—is implied in all of these events.
However, Walsh and her colleagues contend that the controversy has diverted attention from reader behavior and what it may indicate about the need for AI fiction.
The researchers discovered that almost a third of chatbot interactions contain some kind of fiction generating, such as prose and poetry, fan fiction, erotica, or role-play, after analyzing more than 500,000 prompts put into ChatGPT from a public dataset called WildChat.
The researchers discovered that a tiny group of “power users” who create and modify stories compulsively are the source of the great bulk of fiction suggestions. In one instance, over the period of several months, a single user asked ChatGPT to produce thousands of iterations of the same fan-fiction story, which was set in the anime video game Doki Doki Literature Club!. However, the researchers predict that 7% of chatbot users create fiction, even after accounting for intensive use.
There are restrictions on the WildChat dataset. No demographic information may be obtained because the prompts are anonymised. Additionally, because participants had to consent to making their prompts public, the group might not accurately represent the general population; OpenAI informed WIRED that “WildChat is not a representative sample of all ChatGPT users.” According to a 2025 study by OpenAI and the National Bureau of Economic Research, only 1.4% of ChatGPT prompts are related to fiction, which is far less than the researchers’ expectation. (Role-play is not included in OpenAI’s calculation; the business was unable to verify whether erotica is included.)
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