When Petra Ferraz de Novaes isn’t at work, she’s probably lost in a fantasy crafted with the help of artificial intelligence.
Novaes, a 36-year-old software engineer from Brazil, has always loved storytelling. But making every little decision that goes into it—from style and syntax to character development—felt impossible. So in 2024 she asked an AI model to bring one of her ideas to life.
Novaes was delighted by the eccentric, sometimes wayward interpretations of her prompts, which carried the narrative in unexpected directions. “What fascinates me is the unpredictability,” Novaes tells WIRED. “People say that AI hallucinates a lot. But in this case, it’s probably what you want.”
These days, Novaes spends hours at a time building stories with AI, using a program called SillyTavern to run open-source models on her computer. She sketches out a concept—an elven warrior battles the queen of the Amazons and seizes her throne, for example—and watches the model fill in the gaps.
In a single session, Novaes switches between multiple fantasy worlds. Some are hers, and others she borrows—she likes Star Wars, Pokémon, and Mass Effect. Sometimes, Novaes works up self-contained stories the length of a small novel, which she might share online. Otherwise, she participates in private role-plays. “It can be never-ending. You find a quest, you complete it, you go for the next one,” says Novaes. “The limit is your imagination.”
According to a recent study, plenty of people share Novaes’ hobby. “They know [the stories are] produced by an AI model, and they don’t care,” says Melanie Walsh, an assistant professor at the University of Washington Information School who coauthored the study. “In fact, that seems to be a big part of the attraction.”
Lately, the publishing industry has suffered a series of scandals involving the suspected use of AI by professional authors. One publisher canceled a $2 million book deal; another withdrew a novel from the shelves; readers alleged that a prize-winning short story was AI-generated. Implicit in all of these incidents is the idea that nobody wants to read stories generated by machine—that using AI to craft fiction devalues the art form.
But the commotion has distracted from the behavior of readers, Walsh and her colleagues argue, and what it might signal about the appetite for AI fiction.
Analyzing more than 500,000 prompts fed into ChatGPT, drawn from a public dataset called WildChat, the researchers found that more than a third of chatbot interactions involve some form of fiction generation, including prose and poetry, fan fiction, erotica, or role-play.
The vast majority of fiction prompts, the researchers found, stem from a small collection of “power users” who generate and tweak stories obsessively. In one case, a single user prompted ChatGPT to generate versions of the same fan-fiction narrative—set in the world of anime video game Doki Doki Literature Club!—thousands of times over the course of several months. But even controlling for heavy use, the researchers estimate that 7 percent of chatbot users engage in fiction generation.
The WildChat dataset has its limitations. Because the prompts are anonymized, it’s impossible to capture any demographic data. Participants also had to agree to make their prompts public, meaning the group may not reflect the population at large; OpenAI told 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 1.4 percent of ChatGPT prompts are fiction-related, a long way short of the researchers’ estimate. (OpenAI’s figure does not include role-play; the company could not confirm whether it counts erotica.)