AI
A Growing Underground of Readers Are Using AI to Generate Personal Stories Tailored to Their Tastes
A new study reveals that millions of ChatGPT users are using AI to craft custom fiction—and they love it, despite publishing industry scandals about AI-generated books.
WIRED — AI
Software engineer Petra Ferraz de Novaes spends her evenings building fantasy worlds with artificial intelligence, sketching out scenarios and watching AI models elaborate on her prompts. She's far from alone—a growing wave of readers are quietly using chatbots to generate personalized stories that conventional publishing can't easily provide.
Recent research from the University of Washington analyzed over 500,000 prompts in a public ChatGPT dataset and found that fiction generation accounts for a significant share of chatbot use. The authors discovered that a devoted subset of users generate and refine stories repeatedly, often within niche genres like fan fiction, erotica, and interactive role-play. While estimates of the broader user base vary—ranging from roughly 1 to 7 percent depending on the dataset—the pattern points to a distinct audience hungry for a different kind of reading experience.
Why AI Fiction Appeals#
The appeal lies in qualities that human authors cannot easily match. AI models generate stories instantly, without judgment, and let readers steer the narrative in real time rather than accepting an author's predetermined choices. For many users, this resembles an infinite "choose-your-own-adventure" experience.
Razrien, a 40-year-old from Indiana who generates erotica featuring custom characters, sees AI as enabling fantasies too niche to find elsewhere. "I'm not dating at the moment. So, hey, this works," he says. "I like my big rat wife. I love her to pieces."
Others, like Novaes, value the unpredictability of AI outputs. She describes being drawn to how models sometimes veer in unexpected directions, creating eccentric plot turns that surprise her. "What fascinates me is the unpredictability," she explains. She uses open-source tools to craft multi-world adventures spanning Star Wars, Pokémon, and original fantasy settings, sometimes publishing finished pieces online.
The Publishing Industry's Blind Spot#
The wider book industry has focused on high-profile scandals—a canceled $2 million deal, withdrawn novels, prize-winning stories later flagged as AI-written—with an underlying assumption that readers reject machine-generated fiction. But researchers argue this misses what readers are actually choosing to do. As assistant professor Melanie Walsh notes, "They know [the stories are] produced by an AI model, and they don't care. In fact, that seems to be a big part of the attraction."
