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

When Petra Ferraz de Novaes isn’t at work, she’s probably lost in a fantasy—one that doesn’t exist in any novel or film, but in a conversation she’s having with an artificial intelligence. Novaes is a 36-year-old software engineer from Brazil, and she has always loved storytelling. But for years, the act of actually writing felt like a battle. Every little decision—the style, the syntax, the way a character might react, the pacing of a scene, the point where a plot should twist—seemed impossibly heavy. The blank page asked too much of her imagination, and the result was often paralysis. Then, in 2024, she tried something different. Instead of forcing herself to compose a story from scratch, she asked an AI model to bring one of her ideas to life. What came back was far stranger and more delightful than she had expected. The model took her prompts and ran with them in odd, eccentric, sometimes wayward directions. It introduced details Novaes never would have chosen. It ignored some instructions and embellished others. It made leaps of logic that felt less like errors and more like leaps of faith. Novaes was enchanted. “What fascinates me is the unpredictability,” she told WIRED. “People say that AI hallucinates a lot. But in this case, it’s probably what you want.” For Novaes, those hallucinations aren’t bugs. They’re the spark. They’re what makes each session feel less like commanding a machine and more like playing with an endlessly inventive friend who never runs out of ideas—and who never judges yours.

These days, Novaes can spend hours at a time building stories with AI, using a program called SillyTavern to run open-source models on her own computer. She starts with a simple sketch of a premise—an elven warrior battles the queen of the Amazons and seizes her throne, for example—and then watches as the model fills in the gaps around her idea. It invents dialogue, choreographs battle scenes, explores the emotional weight of power, betrayal, and victory. In a single session, Novaes might move between several very different fantasy worlds. Some are entirely her own creations, worlds she has built in her head over years of daydreaming. Others are borrowed from beloved franchises; her tastes span Star Wars, Pokémon, and Mass Effect. Sometimes she works up self-contained stories that reach the length of a small novel, and she may share those online with other enthusiasts. Other times, she participates in private role-plays, collaborative narratives in which she writes for her character while the AI handles everyone else. Those stories can stretch on indefinitely. “It can be never-ending,” she says. “You find a quest, you complete it, you go for the next one. The limit is your imagination.” There is no pressure to publish, no market to satisfy, no editor waiting. The story is hers alone, even when it’s not—because the words on the screen are generated by a machine, but the direction, the passion, and the sense of wonder are all her own. For Novaes, this isn’t a cheap shortcut to writing. It’s a creative playground where she finally feels free.

She is far from alone. A recent study from researchers at the University of Washington suggests that a great many people have discovered the same joy in AI-assisted storytelling. Melanie Walsh, an assistant professor at the University of Washington Information School who coauthored the study, says that the people in their data are not fooling themselves about what they’re using. “They know [the stories are] produced by an AI model, and they don’t care,” Walsh says. “In fact, that seems to be a big part of the attraction.” The researchers analyzed more than 500,000 prompts fed into ChatGPT, drawn from a public dataset called WildChat. What they found was striking: more than a third of all chatbot interactions involve some form of fiction generation. That includes prose and poetry, fan fiction, erotica, and role-play. The vast majority of these fiction prompts come from a relatively small group of “power users”—people who generate and tweak stories obsessively, sometimes over months. In one extreme case, a single user prompted ChatGPT to generate versions of the same fan-fiction narrative, set in the world of the anime video game Doki Doki Literature Club!, thousands of times over the course of several months. But even after controlling for those heavy users, the researchers estimate that about seven percent of chatbot users engage in fiction generation. That’s millions of people. And it suggests that our public debate about AI fiction—which tends to focus on whether machines can write good books—has missed something important. People aren’t waiting for AI to produce a finished, publishable novel. They are using it to create private or semi-private stories for their own pleasure, and they are having a wonderful time.

This may surprise anyone who has followed the recent scandals in the publishing industry. Lately, there has been a series of high-profile controversies involving the suspected use of AI by professional authors. One publisher canceled a two-million-dollar book deal after discovering that a debut novel had been written with AI assistance. Another publisher withdrew a novel from store shelves amid questions about its origins. Readers publicly alleged that a prize-winning short story was AI-generated, and many people reacted with anger and disappointment. Implicit in all of these incidents is the idea that nobody wants to read stories generated by a machine—that using AI to craft fiction devalues the entire art form, turning literature into just another automated product. But Walsh and her colleagues argue that all the commotion has distracted us from what readers are actually doing. While the publishing industry debates whether AI has a place on bookstore shelves, ordinary people are quietly replacing that debate with their own behavior. They are generating their own stories by the hour, not because they want to sell them, but because they enjoy the experience. They are not waiting for a famous novelist to produce an AI masterpiece. They are building worlds for themselves, often in collaboration with characters and settings they already love. The attraction isn’t the final product. It’s the journey—the unexpected twists, the weird details, the sense that an alien intelligence is dreaming alongside them. The study suggests that the appetite for AI fiction is not only real, it is already enormous. It just doesn’t look like the literary market. It looks like play.

Still, it’s important not to overstate what we know. The WildChat dataset has real limitations. Because the prompts are anonymized, researchers cannot capture demographic information such as age, education, or geography. More importantly, participants had to agree to make their prompts public, meaning the group may not reflect the population at large. OpenAI itself 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 arrives at a very different number: it suggests that only 1.4 percent of ChatGPT prompts are fiction-related, far lower than Walsh and her colleagues’ estimate. The two studies are measuring different things, though. OpenAI’s figure does not include role-play, and the company could not confirm whether it counts erotica. Walsh’s broader definition, which includes poetry, fan fiction, role-playing, and even the kind of interactive storytelling Novaes loves, naturally catches more activity. It is also possible that WildChat’s public nature attracts people who are more comfortable sharing their creative experiments—and such people may well be more interested in generating fiction than the average user. The exact number, in other words, remains uncertain. But even the more conservative estimate points to something meaningful. If 1.4 percent of all ChatGPT prompts are fiction-related, and ChatGPT has hundreds of millions of users, that still translates into tens of millions of people who have tried to generate stories with AI. The phenomenon is not a fringe hobby. It is a new form of creative expression, one that has arrived so quickly that we are still struggling to find language to describe it. And at the center of it are people like Novaes: not professional writers, not tech evangelists, just ordinary human beings who love stories.

What should we make of all this? Perhaps the most important lesson is that the debate over AI fiction belongs not just to publishers and prize committees, but to the quiet, unglamorous margins of everyday creativity. People have always made up stories for themselves. They have told them to their children, shared them with friends, kept them in private journals, or simply spun them in their heads while walking home. AI has not invented the desire to narrate. It has simply given that desire a new tool—a patient, infinitely available collaborator that never gets tired, never gets bored, and never says no. For every person who dreams of being a published novelist, there are countless others who just want to spend an evening exploring a world of their own making. AI makes that possible in a way that feels almost magical. It is not hard to see why so many people are drawn to it. There are still serious questions about authorship, originality, and value. If a machine writes the words, whose story is it? Is the human who prompted the machine an author, or just an audience member with a remote control? These questions matter, but they are not questions that can be answered by scandal alone. They are questions that will be answered by how millions of people actually choose to spend their time. And if Petra Ferraz de Novaes is any indication, many are choosing joy. They are choosing play. They are choosing to surrender control and see what their own imagination, reflected through a machine, might reveal. “The limit is your imagination,” Novaes says. That has always been true. What has changed is that now, when imagination runs dry, there is something there to whisper back—and for millions of people, that strange, unexpected voice is exactly what they wanted to hear.