More readers are using chatbots to generate personal fiction

In short: While publishers debate AI-written books, a growing group of readers is using chatbots to create their own made-to-order fiction.

What's going on

Some readers are using AI chatbots to generate stories for themselves, instead of waiting for a book or author to deliver exactly what they want. Petra Ferraz de Novaes, a 36-year-old software engineer in Brazil, told WIRED she spends hours building fantasy stories with AI. She uses SillyTavern, a tool that lets people run open-source AI models on their own computer (open-source means the software is publicly shared, like a recipe anyone can cook).

Novaes likes that the AI can take her idea and surprise her. She compares the “mistakes” people complain about, sometimes called “hallucinations” (when an AI makes things up), to a feature for storytelling. She jumps between different worlds, including her own and settings borrowed from Star Wars, Pokémon, and Mass Effect.

Researchers also see this behavior in data. A recent study looked at more than 500,000 ChatGPT prompts from a public dataset called WildChat, and found that over a third of the recorded conversations involved some kind of fiction, including poetry, fan fiction, erotica, or role-play. The authors say a small number of “power users” drive much of this activity, but they estimate about 7 percent of users in the dataset generate fiction.

The numbers are debated. OpenAI told WIRED that WildChat is not representative of all ChatGPT users, and a separate 2025 study by OpenAI and the National Bureau of Economic Research suggested about 1.4 percent of ChatGPT prompts are fiction-related.

What to watch

AI still struggles with long, consistent novels and complex writing. But if the tools keep improving, more people may treat fiction like a “choose your own adventure” that never ends, and traditional publishing may increasingly split between mass-market entertainment and smaller, human-written niches.

Source: Wired