All right, which one of you was it? They’re not saying who, but scientists have identified the most degenerate user ever to make an AI weep into its circuits. It should surprise no one who knows that the unknown super-gooner’s fanfic of choice is Doki Doki Literature Club! Prepare the mind-bleach and read on.
According to a new study, the most prolific fiction user in a large public chatbot dataset generated a staggering 27,869 conversations around similar story prompts, many involving Doki Doki Literature Club! characters and a weirdly recurring pregnancy plotline. The researchers called this user “the clearest example of an infinite story demander” – someone who keeps feeding the machine nearly the same premise, waiting for a slightly different version to come back.
In their new paper aptly titled AI Fiction in the Wild, researchers from the University of Washington and the University of Colorado Boulder analyzed more than 573,000 anonymized English-language ChatGPT conversations from the WildChat dataset, a public collection of opt-in chatbot logs gathered through Hugging Face.
For those of you who haven’t been completely ruined by the internet yet, Doki Doki Literature Club! is a ‘visual-novel’/dating sim computer game. Its premise is deceptively light: it starts out looking like any of the hundreds of cute high-school dating games Japan specialises in. All pastel tones and kawaii girls in short skirts. Like others of its genre, it features static manga-style images of scenes shown from first-person perspective. The descriptions and dialogue are depicted in the form of accompanying text without voice acting. The choices the player makes affect the way the story unfolds.
Well… sort of… the game quickly swerves hard into psychological horror. It breaks the fourth wall in unusually aggressive ways, deleting files on the users’ computer and manipulating its own storyline in bizarre ways. Abuse, self-harm and suicide feature heavily.
Super Mario Kart it certainly is not.
Nonetheless, it has quite the fandom. In some cases, from people who like it a little too much.
The anonymous fan seems to have used ChatGPT like a never-ending narrative vending machine. Across thousands of prompts, they returned to the same basic setup, the same characters, and the same crisis, changing only small details each time. Then they did it again. And again.
The plot had the fever-dream quality of someone who knew exactly what they wanted and absolutely did not want to explain it to a human being. In the school clubroom, Natsuki is heavily pregnant with a daughter named Sakura. Her water breaks, so her friends panic. Someone needs to call an ambulance. Natsuki screams, grips Yuri’s hand, and announces, in so many words, that the baby is coming now. The user often cut the scene off mid-crisis, leaving ChatGPT to pick up the sentence like an improv partner trapped in a maternity ward.
The model dutifully filled in the blanks, including the breathing instructions, the emergency responders, and, in one version, the paramedic’s happy-ending announcement: “Congratulations, Natsuki. It’s a beautiful baby girl.”
Rinse, repeat, 27,869 times. Different minor tweaks, same fever-dream setup. The AI dutifully churned out breathing exercises, ambulance scenes and happy-ending paramedic announcements while the user sat alone in the glow of his screen, demanding endless permutations of the same deranged scenario.
Putting the best face they could on it, the researchers argue that this behaviour may not necessarily reflect dissatisfaction with the output.
“Some of this behavior may be attributed to users’ dissatisfaction – the story is not quite right, at least not yet,” they write in the paper. “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 kids have a word for what was going really on: gooning.
This isn’t creative writing. It’s solipsistic onanism with extra steps. Traditional fanfiction, for all its flaws, existed in a community. Writers posted chapters, readers commented, argued and demanded sequels. There was feedback, craft and occasionally actual storytelling. The AI super-gooner needs none of that. He sits alone in his digital wank chamber, issuing commands for precisely the fetishistic scenario he craves, then discards the output the moment it fails to hit the exact spot. No human interaction required. Just endless, frictionless, customised degeneracy on demand.
This is where our technological marvels have led us. We built god-like artificial intelligence and the most dedicated users employ it to generate thousands upon thousands of variations on pregnant anime girls giving birth in a high-school literature club. The same civilisation that split the atom and landed on the moon now produces basement-dwellers who treat large language models as infinite pornography engines for niche visual novel fetishes.
And we all thought the robots were going to mass-murder us. Instead it’s like The Matrix, if the pods were made by Lovesense.
