# ‘I Like My Big Rat Wife’: Meet the People Using Chatbots to Write Custom Fiction

> A growing number of readers have stopped waiting for the publishing industry to sort out its feelings about AI and are simply writing the books they want to read themselves. Using chatbots as co-authors, they generate custom fiction tuned to their exact tastes, from cozy romance to the gloriously niche, including the reader who cheerfully wanted a story about his big rat wife. The trend is a quiet inversion of the usual AI-and-writing debate. While authors and publishers argue over disclosure and training data, ordinary people are treating language models as a personal fiction engine, prompting for characters, plots and tones that no traditional publisher would ever greenlight. It is less about replacing novelists than about serving demand the market never bothered to meet. What makes it interesting is how it reframes reading as something participatory. These stories are often shared, remixed and refined in communities, turning private prompts into a kind of folk literature. It is messy, sometimes absurd, and a genuine glimpse of how generative tools reshape culture from the bottom up rather than the top down.

_Section: [Daily AI Updates](https://www.wortins.com/daily-ai) · Source: Wired · Published Monday, September 14, 2026_

## Wortins' read

A growing number of readers have stopped waiting for the publishing industry to sort out its feelings about AI and are simply writing the books they want to read themselves. Using chatbots as co-authors, they generate custom fiction tuned to their exact tastes, from cozy romance to the gloriously niche, including the reader who cheerfully wanted a story about his big rat wife. The trend is a quiet inversion of the usual AI-and-writing debate. While authors and publishers argue over disclosure and training data, ordinary people are treating language models as a personal fiction engine, prompting for characters, plots and tones that no traditional publisher would ever greenlight. It is less about replacing novelists than about serving demand the market never bothered to meet. What makes it interesting is how it reframes reading as something participatory. These stories are often shared, remixed and refined in communities, turning private prompts into a kind of folk literature. It is messy, sometimes absurd, and a genuine glimpse of how generative tools reshape culture from the bottom up rather than the top down.

## Source

[Read the full story at Wired](https://www.wired.com/story/chatbot-generated-fiction-i-like-my-big-rat-wife/)

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