July 1, 2026
Fanfic fever dream unlocked
Are readers generating fiction with AI models?
Readers aren’t just reading anymore — they’re binge-making endless AI stories
TLDR: A new study found that more than a third of sampled ChatGPT chats involved people generating fiction, especially fanfic and erotica, with heavy users driving much of it. Commenters were split between calling it the next big creative shift and rolling their eyes that machine-made stories are just “sufficient.”
The big plot twist in this paper isn’t just that people are using artificial intelligence to make fiction — it’s how much they’re doing it. Researchers looked at more than 500,000 anonymous ChatGPT chats and found over a third involved fiction of some kind: original stories, roleplay, fanfiction, and yes, plenty of erotica. The most dramatic detail? A small group of heavy users seems to be absolutely mainlining custom stories, with researchers dubbing some of them “infinite story demanders” — basically people asking for the same flavors of story over and over in a private, never-ending loop.
And the comments? Oh, they went straight to the existential spiral. One camp said this is just the next internet revolution: first blogs turned readers into writers, then YouTube turned viewers into creators, and now books may be heading for the same chaotic makeover. Another crowd was much more shrug emoji about it: if journalists, lawyers, and pundits already use AI, then why on earth wouldn’t readers do the same? But skeptics also jumped in, pointing out the data is already a little dated and that the output can be merely “sufficient” — not terrible, not great, just there. The funniest energy came from people imagining endlessly generated Harry Potter sitcoms and forever-fanfic universes. The mood was part fascination, part doom, part “we have officially entered the weird personalized-content era,” and honestly? The community sounded both horrified and weirdly ready to hit “generate again.”
Key Points
- •The paper analyzes more than 500,000 anonymized English-language ChatGPT conversations to study AI-assisted fiction generation.
- •More than one third of the conversations in the dataset involve fiction generation, including original stories, roleplay, fanfiction, and erotica.
- •The study finds that fiction generation is dominated by power users rather than being evenly distributed across users.
- •Researchers identify recurring behavior patterns, including "infinite story demanders" who repeatedly request and revise similar narratives over extended periods.
- •The paper argues that LLMs may change the author-reader relationship and align fiction consumption with on-demand, personalized, and repetitive cultural forms.