For Petra Ferraz de Novaes, a 36-year-old software engineer from Brazil, artificial intelligence has become the primary tool for crafting elaborate fantasy narratives. Though she has always enjoyed storytelling, she found the meticulous process of handling every stylistic and character detail overwhelming. In 2024, she began using AI models to bring her ideas to life, discovering that the technology’s occasional hallucinations often led to more engaging and unexpected plot twists.
“What fascinates me is the unpredictability,” Novaes told WIRED. “People say that AI hallucinates a lot. But in this case, it’s probably what you want.”
Novaes spends hours building stories using SillyTavern, an interface that allows users to run open-source models locally. She might sketch out a premise—such as an elven warrior seizing the throne of the Amazon queen—and let the algorithm fill in the details. Her sessions often traverse multiple fictional universes, ranging from her own original concepts to established franchises like Star Wars, Pokémon, and Mass Effect. Whether writing self-contained novellas to share online or engaging in continuous private role-playing, she notes that the only boundary is imagination.
This personal experience reflects a broader trend identified in recent academic research. Melanie Walsh, an assistant professor at the University of Washington Information School, co-authored a study suggesting that many users are unaware of or indifferent to the fact that their stories are AI-generated. “In fact, that seems to be a big part of the attraction,” Walsh said.
The enthusiasm among casual users stands in stark contrast to turmoil within the traditional publishing industry. Recent scandals involving suspected AI use by professional authors have led to canceled book deals and withdrawn novels, reinforcing the notion that machine-generated fiction devalues the art form. However, Walsh argues that these controversies have diverted attention from the actual behavior of readers and the demand for AI-created content.
To understand this demand, researchers analyzed over 500,000 prompts from WildChat, a public dataset of ChatGPT interactions. They found that more than a third of these interactions involved some form of fiction generation, including prose, poetry, fan fiction, erotica, or role-play. The study highlighted a small group of “power users” who drive much of this activity. In one notable instance, a single user generated thousands of variations of a fan-fiction narrative based on the anime video game Doki Doki Literature Club! over several months. Even accounting for these heavy users, the researchers estimated that approximately 7 percent of chatbot users engage in fiction creation.
The study acknowledged limitations in the WildChat dataset, noting that anonymized prompts prevent demographic analysis and that participants opted into public sharing, which may skew representation. OpenAI stated that WildChat is not a representative sample of all ChatGPT users. Furthermore, a 2025 study by OpenAI and the National Bureau of Economic Research suggested a lower figure, estimating that only 1.4 percent of ChatGPT prompts are fiction-related. That analysis did not include role-play, and the company could not confirm whether its data accounted for erotic content.
Is this really a trend or just lonely people role-playing with chatbots? I miss human authors.
Finally, someone admits the unpredictability is the feature, not the bug. Traditional publishing is stuck in the past.