‘I Like My Big Rat Wife’: Meet the People Using Chatbots to Write Custom Fiction
wired ·
A WIRED article profiles readers who use chatbots to generate custom fiction, often for personal entertainment. Petra Ferraz de Novaes, a 36-year-old software engineer in Brazil, began using AI for storytelling in 2024 and now uses SillyTavern with open-source models to build fantasy scenarios, sometimes drawing on Star Wars, Pokémon, and Mass Effect, and she values the unpredictability of AI outputs. A study coauthored by University of Washington researchers analyzed more than 500,000 WildChat prompts and found over a third of chatbot interactions involved fiction generation, including prose, poetry, fan fiction, erotica, and role-play, with most such prompts coming from a small group of power users and an estimated 7 percent of users engaging in fiction generation. The article notes limitations, including that WildChat prompts are anonymized and not representative, and that a 2025 OpenAI/NBER study estimated only 1.4 percent of ChatGPT prompts are fiction-related, excluding role-play. Researchers say AI fiction appeals because models are judgment-free, instantaneous, and nearly inexhaustible, and because users can direct stories or insert themselves into them. One user, Razrien, a 40-year-old man in Indiana, uses AI for erotica and role-play involving hyper-specific fantasies and characters such as a big angry rat wife and an eight-foot werewolf mother. The article discusses concerns that AI-generated fiction may limit exposure to challenging writing, while a coauthor argues it reveals that for many readers literature can be a simple economic exchange for entertainment. It notes current models struggle with ornate prose, complex characters, and book-length coherence, suggests a possible tiered publishing future, and says Novaes now reads other people’s AI stories as the only novels she reads.
wired