“I Adore My Large Rodent Partner”: Discover the Individuals Leveraging Chatbots for Tailored Storytelling

When Petra Ferraz de Novaes is off the clock, she’s likely immersed in a fantasy world shaped by artificial intelligence.

A 36-year-old software engineer from Brazil, Novaes has always had a passion for storytelling. However, managing every aspect—from style and syntax to character arcs—seemed daunting. In 2024, she sought the assistance of an AI model to bring one of her concepts to fruition.

Novaes found herself captivated by the quirky, at times erratic interpretations of her prompts, which led the narrative in surprising directions. “What intrigues me is the unpredictability,” Novaes shares with WIRED. “People say AI hallucinates a lot, but in this scenario, that’s probably what you’re after.”

Currently, Novaes dedicates hours to crafting stories with AI, using a tool called SillyTavern to operate open-source models on her machine. She outlines a premise—such as an elven warrior battling the queen of the Amazons for her throne—and observes as the model fills in the details.

During a single session, Novaes navigates multiple fantasy realms. Some are her own, while others are borrowed—she enjoys Star Wars, Pokémon, and Mass Effect. Occasionally, she creates self-contained stories comparable in length to a small novel, which she may publish online. Otherwise, she engages in private role-plays. “It can feel endless. You find a quest, complete it, and then move on to the next,” Novaes explains. “The only limit is your imagination.”

A recent study indicates that many individuals share Novaes’ interest. “They’re aware that the stories are generated by an AI model, and that doesn’t bother them,” says Melanie Walsh, an assistant professor at the University of Washington Information School and a coauthor of the study. “In fact, that seems to be a significant part of the appeal.”

Recently, the publishing industry has faced a number of controversies surrounding the potential use of AI by professional authors. One publisher scrapped a $2 million book deal; another took a novel off the shelves; readers claimed that a prize-winning short story was AI-generated. Implicit in these situations is the notion that readers are not interested in machine-generated narratives—that using AI to create fiction undermines the art form.

However, Walsh and her colleagues argue that this uproar has overshadowed the behavior of readers and what it could reveal about the demand for AI fiction.

By analyzing over 500,000 prompts submitted to ChatGPT from a public dataset known as WildChat, the researchers discovered that more than a third of interactions with the chatbot involved some type of fiction creation, including prose, poetry, fan fiction, erotica, or role-playing.

The researchers identified that the majority of fiction prompts originated from a small group of “power users” who actively generate and modify stories. In one instance, a single user prompted ChatGPT to produce iterations of the same fan-fiction narrative—set in the world of the anime video game Doki Doki Literature Club!—thousands of times over several months. Nevertheless, even when accounting for heavy usage, the researchers estimate that about 7 percent of chatbot users participate in fiction generation.

The WildChat dataset has its drawbacks. Due to anonymization, capturing demographic data is impossible. Participants also had to consent to make their prompts public, suggesting that the group may not represent the broader population; OpenAI informed WIRED that “WildChat is not a representative sample of all ChatGPT users.” A 2025 study by OpenAI and the National Bureau of Economic Research suggests that only 1.4 percent of ChatGPT prompts relate to fiction, significantly lower than the researchers’ estimate. (OpenAI’s figure excludes role-playing; the company could not confirm whether it includes erotica.)