Teagan Johnson

@teagrjohnson.bsky.social

PhD student @ CU Boulder studying NLP and cultural analytics https://johnsont4.github.io/

Boulder NLP has 19 papers accepted to #ACL2026 across the main conference, findings and workshops! 🚀 We'll be presenting work on morphology, machine translation, narratives, low-resource languages, CSS, HCI, LLMs, fairness/bias, and more. See you in San Diego! 🌊 ☀️ 🌮

List of main conference papers at ACL 2026 from Boulder NLP.List of main conference and findings papers at ACL 2026 from Boulder NLP.List of findings and workshop papers at ACL 2026 from Boulder NLP.List of workshop papers at ACL 2026 from Boulder NLP.

What are people really doing with chatbots? 👀 Turns out that a lot of them are writing/reading various kinds of fiction, and in particular, they're generating a ton of erotica! What does this mean for the future of reading? Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2606.22748 Web Explorer: ai-fiction-wild.com

Melanie Walsh@mellymeldubs.bsky.social · last mo.

Excited to share this. @neel2112.bsky.social, @mariaa.bsky.social, and I analyzed 500K anonymous ChatGPT convos (shared w/ consent from WildChat) to see if people were generating fiction. We found tons of stories, fanfiction & erotica. Many users iterated on the same stories for days and weeks.

Screenshot of paper abstract that reads: 

AI FICTION IN THE WILD Neel Gupta  Maria Antoniak  Melanie Walsh

Some professional authors are beginning to use AI tools to help produce their fiction writing. Are readers using AI to generate fiction, too? Drawing on over 500,000 anonymized, English-language ChatGPT-user conversations (Zhao et al.), we find that more than one third of the conversations involve some form of fiction generation—including original stories, roleplay, fanfiction, and erotica. This AI-generated fiction is notably dominated by power users. We identify common fiction generation patterns and profiles among these users, including what we call infinite story demanders, who repeatedly request and revise variations of the same or similar narratives over extended periods of time. We show that users especially gravitate toward fanfiction and erotica, and that they are broadly drawn to generic forms, repetition, immediacy, and niche combinations of story elements. Our findings motivate two theoretical provocations. First, we argue that AI technologies may lead to a shift in the conventional relationship between the author and reader, potentially producing what we call a solipsistic reader-writer, who both generates and consumes fiction within a closed conversational loop, interacting with a machine rather than a human other. Second, we note that LLMs enable interactivity, play, and permutation in ways that are seemingly pleasurable for users, raising questions about where AI will fit into contemporary storytelling and entertainment ecosystems. We situate these developments within broader transformations in literature and media, including self-publishing, fanfiction, and pornography, and suggest that AI-generated fiction shares structural affinities with on-demand, personalized, and repetitive cultural forms.

As you may be aware, the Trump administration is planning to dismantle NCAR. I can't say enough about how pivotal NCAR is to worldwide public safety, and also to the mentorship of future scientists. Today is the NSF-imposed deadline for submitting public feedback to congresspeople (see link below).