When Petra Ferraz de Novaes, a 36-year-old software engineer from Brazil, isn’t at work, she’s crafting fantasy tales with the help of AI. She uses a program called SillyTavern, running open-source models on her computer, to bring her ideas to life. The unpredictability of AI’s interpretations fascinates her, as it pushes her imagination in unexpected directions.

According to a recent study, many people, like Novaes, enjoy using AI to generate stories. Melanie Walsh, an assistant professor at the University of Washington Information School, points out that people don’t mind that the stories are produced by an AI model. In fact, this unpredictability seems to make the stories more appealing.

The publishing industry has faced several controversies involving the suspected use of AI by professional authors. However, Walsh argues that the commotion has distracted from the behavior of readers and what it might signal about the appetite for AI fiction. Analyzing more than 500,000 prompts fed into ChatGPT, the researchers found that over a third of the interactions involve some form of fiction generation, including prose, poetry, fan fiction, erotica, and role-play.

Razrien, a 40-year-old man from Indiana, uses AI to explore his sexual kinks. He creates fantasy characters, such as a 'big angry rat wife' and an 'eight-foot tall werewolf mommy with a bad temper.' He prefers models like Google’s Gemma 4, which are particularly adept at satisfying his specific fantasies.

The concern, however, is that the ability to generate fiction might limit people's exposure to different types of writing that could stretch their creativity. Despite this, AI-generated stories are rapidly becoming a new way to explore the human imagination.