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AI’s promises tend to be pretty highfalutin: that you can use it as your “second brain,” to invent “new physics,” or to become the genius autodidact you always dreamed of being.
Or you can drop these pretensions and just use it to crank out unimaginable amounts of fetish slop, as a group of researchers from the University of Washington and the University of Colorado Boulder currently in the middle of pouring bleach on their eyeballs inadvertently discovered.
While analyzing a dataset comprising millions of conversations with an old version of ChatGPT, these innocent academics encountered a user who is — it’s no exaggeration to say — the final boss of AI gooners.
Specifically, this anonymous horndog spent months using the OpenAI chatbot to generate vividly detailed pregnancy fanfiction about the high school characters in the visual novel series “Doki Doki Literature Club!” (itself a bizarre piece of media that the uninitiated will need to research for themselves.)
For this, the baby bump fetishist earned the plaudits of being the “most prolific user” in the fiction dataset — and “the clearest example of an infinite story demander,” the researchers wrote in their resulting yet-to-be-peer-reviewed study, which was first spotted by the Japanese outlet ITMedia and later picked up in English by Automaton.
You may be appalled by the subject matter, but the study is a fascinating glimpse into how AI users use chatbots to generate fiction, which made up more than a third of the over 500,000 anonymized conversations in the dataset. To help categorize this mountain of data, the researchers used another large language model, finding that, of the fictional conversations, nearly half were fanfiction, and over a quarter were sexually explicit.
One thing that stood out were the small group of “power users” who obsessively used the AI to this end. They generally fell along two distinct archetypes, the researchers found. One were “story cyclers” who ask for iterations of the same story for a certain period before moving on, and “infinite story demanders,” who repeatedly use the AI to revise variations of the same story over much longer periods of time
The average fiction-generating user entered repetitive prompts 42 percent of the time, they found. Among the ten most prolific users in the dataset, this jumped to 85 percent.
“Some of this behavior may be attributed to users’ dissatisfaction — the story is not quite right, at least not yet,” the researchers wrote. “But we argue that in many cases it is fueled by the satisfaction of reading endless permutations of the same story, none of which end the same way twice.”
The extreme power users definitely tipped the scales, as just two percent of them in the fiction category were responsible for more than 80 percent of the conversations. And our “Doki Doki Literature Club!” pregnancy fetishist was the king of them all.
“While this user is a particularly prolific outlier, and we can’t say with certainty why they are generating these stories, many prolific users ask for the same kinds of fiction in a similar vein,” the researchers concluded.
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