‘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 crafted with the help of artificial intelligence.

Novaes, a 36-year-old software engineer from Brazil, has always loved storytelling. But making every little decision that goes into it—from style and syntax to character development—felt impossible. So in 2024 she asked an AI model to bring one of her ideas to life.

Novaes was delighted by the eccentric, sometimes wayward interpretations of her prompts, which carried the narrative in unexpected directions. “What fascinates me is the unpredictability,” Novaes tells WIRED. “People say that AI hallucinates a lot. But in this case, it’s probably what you want.”

These days, Novaes spends hours at a time building stories with AI, using a program called SillyTavern to run open-source models on her computer. She sketches out a concept—an elven warrior battles the queen of the Amazons and seizes her throne, for example—and watches the model fill in the gaps.

In a single session, Novaes switches between multiple fantasy worlds. Some are hers, and others she borrows—she likes Star Wars, Pokémon, and Mass Effect. Sometimes, Novaes works up self-contained stories the length of a small novel, which she might share online. Otherwise, she participates in private role-plays. “It can be never-ending. You find a quest, you complete it, you go for the next one,” says Novaes. “The limit is your imagination.”

According to a recent study, plenty of people share Novaes’ hobby. “They know [the stories are] produced by an AI model, and they don’t care,” says Melanie Walsh, an assistant professor at the University of Washington Information School who coauthored the study. “In fact, that seems to be a big part of the attraction.”

But the commotion has distracted from the behavior of readers, Walsh and her colleagues argue, and what it might signal about the appetite for AI fiction.