Heavy Users Drive ChatGPT Fanfiction and Erotica Surge, Study Finds

Generative AI has become a tool for fiction, role-playing and fan-created stories, but aggregate usage figures can obscure how heavily a small number of people shape activity. Researchers at the University of Washington and the University of Colorado Boulder examined WildChat, a dataset of real-world ChatGPT interactions, to assess how often users turned to the chatbot for fictional writing and how that activity was distributed.

The team analyzed about 570,000 ChatGPT conversations in WildChat and found that fictional creation accounted for 34% of conversation volume, with fanfiction and erotic writing making up a particularly large share. The pattern was highly concentrated: a tiny number of extreme outlier users generated most of the relevant traffic. The findings suggest headline usage rates may reflect intensive activity by a narrow group rather than broadly similar behavior across the user base.