The beautiful new world has gifted us chat bots. But when you know what they are used for, you want to turn back time.
Sometimes you find studies or articles on the internet where you learn about things you actually didn’t want to know. But they are like a car accident – you don’t want to look, but somehow you have to. That’s how we felt this morning in the editorial office when we came across a study whose content we definitely need to share with you – just so that we don’t have to carry this burden alone.
Therefore, welcome to the first and perhaps only edition of “Enough Internet for today”.
500,000 AI chats thoroughly analyzed
The University of Colorado Boulder has published a paper titled “AI Fiction in the Wild” and the emphasis here is clearly on the word “wild”. They were able to analyze over 570,000 anonymous conversations with the chatbot ChatGPT (GPT-3.5 Turbo and GPT-4). This was possible because the chatbot was offered for free on Hugging Face, albeit at the price that the resulting dialogues could indeed be scientifically analyzed.
The researchers came to some interesting results regarding user behavior.
Of the dialogues, nearly 195,000 were declared as fiction – meaning content that did not concern real existing facts, but rather invented characters. Just over a quarter (52,000) of the dialogues were “material with explicit sexual content” – which probably doesn’t surprise most.
What is interesting, however, is that there was a small group of “power users” who repeatedly made the same requests to have stories generated that underwent only minimal changes. The researchers found that nearly 2% of users were responsible for over 80% of the fictional content. Or to stay specific with this dataset: Around 200 people were responsible for over 150,000 of the fictional requests.
The Doki Doki Pregnancy Club!
The study particularly highlights one user who apparently made it his mission to have AI fanfiction created for “Doki Doki Literature Club!” For those who don’t know: At first glance, it’s a cute anime dating game, which quickly turns out to be a creepy psychological horror title.
The requests made by this one AI fanfiction fan go – you guessed it – in a rather strange direction. He starts his request by outlining the beginning of a dialogue between the characters, where one of the protagonists suddenly is pregnant and going into labor. The dialogue then ends mid-sentence – and is subsequently continued by the AI. Oh, just see for yourself:
In addition to over 22,000 requests for Doki Doki Literature Club!, other franchises were also repeatedly used for such fictional requests, like Freedom Planet (~5,200), League of Legends (~4,500), or Naruto (~4,300).
Of course, there is also the possibility that a group of internet trolls simply teamed up. After all, it was clearly stated when using the free chatbot variant that the data would be used for analyses. Maybe one or the other thought: “I’ll give the scientists something to analyze. They shouldn’t get bored with their work.”
This definitely worked.
So the next time you consider buying a new PC or console and the exorbitant prices for the hardware shock you, you can keep in mind: It’s not so bad, because humanity has the freedom to generate pregnancy stories around fictional characters. Humanity’s resources are definitely being used in a remarkably good way.
In this spirit: Enough Internet for today.
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