‘I Like My Big Rat Wife’: Meet the People Using Chatbots to Write Custom Fiction

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Researchers at the University of Washington Information School, led by assistant professor Melanie Walsh, analyzed over 500,000 prompts from the WildChat public dataset and found that more than one-third of all ChatGPT interactions involve some form of fiction generation: prose, poetry, fan fiction, erotica, or collaborative role-play. The finding challenges the dominant narrative that AI-generated text is unwanted by consumers. The vast majority of fiction prompts come from a small group of power users who generate and iterate on stories obsessively. One user in the dataset alone produced hundreds of variations on the same fan-fiction narrative set in the Doki Doki Literature Club universe. Tools like SillyTavern allow users to run open-source models locally, enabling uncensored, persistent collaborative worlds across franchises like Star Wars, Pokémon, and original fantasy settings. The publishing industry has been roiled by scandals over AI-assisted authors — a million book deal was canceled, a novel pulled from shelves, a short story prize contested. All of these incidents rest on the assumption that readers reject AI-generated fiction. The WildChat analysis suggests the opposite: many readers actively seek it out, valuing the unpredictability and infinite continuation that human authors cannot provide. The study reframes AI's role in creative writing as participatory rather than replacement-oriented — readers co-creating rather than passively consuming.