For Petra Ferraz de Novaes, artificial intelligence is not only a way to find answers or complete tasks. The 36-year-old software engineer from Brazil uses it to build stories, moving between several fantasy worlds in a single session.
Novaes began using AI for storytelling in 2024. Her setup includes SillyTavern, a program that lets her run open-source models on her computer. Instead of working on one fixed narrative, she switches between different fictional settings, characters, and situations as her session unfolds.
Her habit points to a wider use of chatbots that often receives less attention than office work or question-answering: fiction. More than a third of chatbot interactions involve some form of fiction generation, including prose, poetry, fan fiction, erotica, or role-play. Researchers estimate that 7 percent of chatbot users engage in fiction generation.
Fiction Is More Than a Side Use
The scale looks different depending on how researchers count it. A 2025 study by OpenAI and the National Bureau of Economic Research suggests that 1.4 percent of ChatGPT prompts are fiction-related. Another dataset included more than 500,000 prompts fed into ChatGPT, drawn from the WildChat dataset.
One user prompted ChatGPT to create versions of the same fan-fiction narrative thousands of times over several months. That kind of repetition shows how a chatbot can become part writing tool, part creative partner, and part engine for exploring endless variations on one idea.
For users who enjoy role-play, the appeal can be even more personal. Razrien, the online username of a 40-year-old man from Indiana, uses AI to create fantasy characters for role-play. His characters include a “big angry rat wife” and an “eight-foot tall werewolf mommy with a bad temper.”
Razrien uses Google’s Gemma 4, an AI model, for this work. The unusual characters may sound playful, but the activity sits inside a much larger shift: people are using language models not only to write about imaginary relationships, but also to simulate them.
From Imaginary Characters to Companionship
The line between fiction and companionship can become hard to see. Mark Zuckerberg said in 2025 that the average American has fewer than three people they consider friends, while the demand for more is around 15. That gap helps explain why conversational systems can attract people who want more interaction than their offline lives provide.
A September 2026 survey by Elon University found that 27% of U.S. adults who use the internet say they have significant emotional or social interactions with large language models. The finding does not mean every one of those interactions looks like a friendship, but it shows that chatbots have moved into a personal part of daily life for many users.
Researchers from Stanford reviewed 464,687 messages from 237 participants in a study of U.S. adults who use the AI companion platform Character.AI. The research found that people with smaller social circles offline are more likely to use chatbots for companionship and experience feelings of loneliness, lower life satisfaction, and a lower sense of belonging.
Yutong Zhang, the author of the Stanford study and a PhD student at Stanford, examined how these interactions developed over time. Many people do not describe their conversations on Character.AI as interpersonal, but their chat history can cross into that realm as the relationship with the chatbot continues.
What Chatbots Cannot Provide
The attraction is clear, but the limits are just as important. AI companions cannot provide physical intimacy or emotional reciprocity. They can respond to a person’s words, continue a fictional scene, and produce a familiar style of conversation, but they cannot offer a genuine interpersonal relationship.
Samantha Hill, a licensed clinical social worker and psychotherapist, puts the difference in terms of what real relationships demand: “What actually helps you to progress in life, in these relationships, is the conflict.” Disagreement and tension can be difficult, but they also force people to understand one another, set boundaries, and change.
Chatbots do not create that same human exchange. They can support fiction generation and offer a steady conversational presence, yet connection remains crucial for wellbeing, and chatbots are incapable of offering genuine interpersonal relationships.
There is also a privacy cost to treating these systems as trusted companions. Sharing sensitive information with a chatbot means sharing it with the company that runs the service. That matters when conversations contain personal fears, loneliness, relationship concerns, or details that users would not tell other people.
The future of chatbot use may sit in the space between creative tool and companion. Novaes uses AI to move through fantasy worlds, while Razrien builds characters for role-play. Other users may begin with fiction and end up sharing parts of their real lives. The technology can make those transitions feel natural, but the boundaries still matter.
Based on
- ‘I Like My Big Rat Wife’: Meet the People Using Chatbots to Write Custom Fiction — wired.com
- Chatbots can exploit our most basic human drive for attachment. Here’s how to have healthier relationship with AI | Gaynor Parkin and Dave Winsborough | The Guardian — theguardian.com
- Research Shows a New Downside of Making Friends With AI — cnbc.com
