Sci-fi magazine overwhelmed by hundreds of AI-generated stories

Clarkesworld, a science fiction journal, has banned new story submissions after receiving lots of of low-quality AI-generated items

By Matthew Sparkes

Science fiction journal Clarkesworld has halted story submissions after receiving a rising deluge of AI-generated items. The journal’s founding editor, Neil Clarke, says the issue has been created by individuals selling surprisingly succesful AI language fashions reminiscent of ChatGPT as a technique to earn cash from fiction publishing – regardless of the poor high quality of the AI tales.

“The machine-written submissions we’ve received are far from publishable quality,” he says. “I’m sure there are some that are less detectable, but the majority we’ve received have been easy for me to identify.”

Clarke says that he has talked to different journal editors who at the moment have the identical downside, though he says they’ve been reluctant to talk to the press – as he was, till the issue grew to unsustainable ranges.

The journal usually has an open submission coverage to encourage new writers, however took the choice to shut submissions on 20 February after receiving 50 AI-generated story submissions that day. At that time, Clarkesworld had acquired 700 professional submissions because the begin of the month and 500 machine-generated ones, with the speed of enhance which means that AI-generated tales would quickly take over.

Clarke says the rise in “spammy” submissions started in direction of the tip of 2022, the identical time that accessible giant language AI fashions had been launched, and have elevated month on month. “They don’t care about their reputation in the field. That makes it more like malware or credit card fraud and faces similar challenges. We’ll try to minimise these instances and they will try to get around it,” he says.

Not all fee-paying science fiction magazines have seen the identical downside, nevertheless. Djibril al-Ayad, editor at The Future Fire, says that he has observed no spike in spam submissions, however that could be right down to being a smaller title. “I suppose the problem is if your submissions pile triples in size and all the AI stuff is abysmal but still has to be read, then it becomes a kind of denial-of-service attack situation,” he says, referring to attackers who knock servers offline by submitting big numbers of requests for knowledge.

“My take would be not to be particularly worried about the danger of accidentally publishing AI-generated fiction,” he says, as most will likely be dangerous. “If it isn’t, then well… cool.”