One ChatGPT user generated thousands of Doki Doki Literature Club birth fanfics. Thousands.
A new academic study dug into how people actually use ChatGPT for creative writing, and found that a third of conversations involve fiction. But the detail breaking the internet is one “extreme outlier” who generated thousands of stories about Doki Doki Literature Club characters giving birth. Here’s what the research really found.
We finally have some hard data on what people are secretly using ChatGPT to write, and it’s exactly as weird as you’d hope.
A new academic study analyzed over half a million ChatGPT conversations and uncovered a goldmine of findings about AI fiction, including one gloriously bizarre “extreme outlier” that’s now taking over the internet. Here’s what the researchers actually discovered.
The headline-grabbing weirdo
Let’s get straight to the detail everyone’s talking about.
Buried in the data, researchers found a single anonymous user who had generated thousands of fanfiction stories about Doki Doki Literature Club characters giving birth.
Not a few.
Thousands.
Over the course of months, this person kept prompting ChatGPT for slightly different versions of the same pregnancy-and-childbirth concept, over and over again.
The researchers flagged them as a clear “extreme outlier”, and honestly, the sheer dedication is almost impressive. (One small mercy: unlike a lot of the fiction in the study, this particular birthing saga was reportedly pretty wholesome, not explicit.) The finding has already become a full-blown meme, with people online marveling at the commitment it takes to request that many variations of one very specific idea.
Wait, what’s Doki Doki Literature Club?
Quick context for the uninitiated.
Doki Doki Literature Club! is a wildly popular indie game from 2017 that looks like a cute anime dating simulator, but is actually a psychological horror game (complete with serious content warnings).
It has a massive, devoted fanbase, which is probably why it looms so large in this data. In fact, in a genuinely surprising twist, Doki Doki Literature Club was the single most-mentioned franchise in the entire study, beating out juggernauts like Naruto and League of Legends.
So our childbirth-fanfic friend isn’t entirely alone, DDLC fans are clearly putting ChatGPT to work.
What the study actually set out to find
Here’s the real research beneath the funny headline.
The study, titled “AI Fiction in the Wild,” comes from researchers at the University of Washington and the University of Colorado Boulder. They analyzed over 500,000 anonymized, English-language ChatGPT conversations from a public, consent-based dataset called WildChat.
The big-picture finding: people are using AI to write a lot of fiction. More than a third of all conversations involved some kind of fiction generation, original stories, roleplay, worldbuilding, fanfiction, and erotica. Of those fiction prompts, about half were fanfiction, and more than a quarter contained sexually explicit content. So beneath the “help me write an email” use case, there’s a huge, thriving world of people using ChatGPT as a personal story machine.
The real bombshell: a tiny group does almost all of it
Here’s the finding that’s arguably more significant than the birth fanfic.
The study found that AI fiction is overwhelmingly driven by a small band of obsessive power users. Specifically, the top 2% of users generated more than 80% of all the fiction. To put that in perspective: out of roughly 10,000 people generating fiction, an estimated 200 people were responsible for over 150,000 prompts.
The researchers even categorized these heavy users into two types:
“Story cyclers”, people who repeatedly generate versions of the same story for a while, then move on to a new obsession.
“Infinite story demanders”, people (like our DDLC friend) who spend long stretches endlessly requesting nearly identical stories with tiny variations.
It turns out AI fiction isn’t a broad phenomenon where everyone writes a little. It’s a small number of deeply committed users writing an absolute mountain of it.
The serious question underneath the jokes
Here’s why this actually matters, beyond the laughs.
As funny as the childbirth-fanfic outlier is, the researchers raise a genuinely thought-provoking concern. If a growing number of people are using AI to generate endless streams of fiction for themselves, purely to satisfy their own specific tastes on demand, it raises real questions about the future of storytelling.
The worry is that AI fiction could “quietly replace human readers and writers altogether”, not through some dramatic robot takeover, but through millions of people quietly retreating into personalized, infinite, machine-made content instead of reading (or writing) the work of other humans.
It’s a subtle shift, but a potentially profound one for creativity, fandom, and the whole idea of storytelling as something we share.
The ChatGPT fanfic study: what it really tells us
The viral headline is 100% real: an academic study genuinely found someone who used ChatGPT to generate thousands of Doki Doki Literature Club birth stories, and yes, it’s very funny. But the study is about a lot more than one dedicated weirdo. It reveals that AI-generated fiction is already massive, heavily skewed toward fanfiction and explicit content, and dominated by a tiny group of hyper-obsessive power users cranking out the vast majority of it.
Underneath the memes is a real question worth sitting with: as AI makes it effortless to summon infinite, personalized stories on demand, what happens to the human writers and the shared culture of storytelling?
The Doki Doki birth-fic legend is the funny part. The quiet reshaping of how, and why, we tell stories is the part that’ll actually stick around. One thing’s for sure, somewhere out there, someone is still requesting variation number 3,001.
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Article compiled and edited by Derek Gibbs (entertainment editor) and the Clownfish TV newsroom.
Hat Tips:
“AI Fiction in the Wild” (University of Washington and University of Colorado Boulder) (2026), the study itself, verified for the core findings (over 500,000/573,453 anonymized English-language ChatGPT conversations from the consent-based WildChat dataset, the ~34% fiction rate, the top-2%-of-users-producing-80%-of-fiction concentration, the “story cyclers” and “infinite story demanders” user categories, and the concern about AI fiction replacing human readers and writers)
Dexerto and Automaton West (July 2026), verified for the Doki Doki Literature Club childbirth-fanfic “extreme outlier,” DDLC topping the most-mentioned-franchise list ahead of Naruto and League of Legends, the roughly half-fanfiction and over-a-quarter-explicit breakdown, the ~200 users responsible for 150,000+ prompts, and the note that the childbirth thread was surprisingly wholesome
Outlook Respawn and Know Your Meme (July 2026), verified for the study’s authorship and methodology, the 573,453 conversation count, the power-user framing, and the finding’s spread into a viral “Extreme Outlier ChatGPT User” meme in early July 2026