Clarkesworld sci-fi magazine overwhelmed by hundreds of AI-generated stories

Sci-fi magazine Clarkesworld banned new article submissions after receiving hundreds of low-quality AI-generated articles.

To Matthew Sparks

sci-fi magazine Clarks World stopped submitting stories after receiving a deluge of AI-generated works. The magazine’s founding editor, Neil Clark, said the problem was the use of surprisingly capable AI language models such as ChatGPT as a way to make money from publishing fiction despite the low quality of AI stories. It states that it was caused by people promoting it.

“The machine-written submissions we have received are nowhere near publishable quality,” he says. “I think some of them are hard to detect, but the majority of the ones I received were easily identifiable.”

Clark says he has spoken to other magazine editors who now have the same problem, but they were hesitant to talk to the press until the problem grew to unsustainable levels, he said. say.

Magazines usually have open submission policies to encourage new authors. However, after receiving 50 AI-generated story submissions on February 20, we made the decision to close submissions. at the time, Clarks World Since the beginning of the month, there have been 700 legitimate posts and 500 machine-generated posts. The growth rate means that AI-generated stories will take over quickly.

According to Clark, the rise in “spam” submissions began towards the end of 2022, the same time the accessible large-scale language AI model was launched, and is increasing month by month. “They don’t care about their reputation in the field. So malware and credit he like card fraud and they face similar problems. We try to minimize these instances and They try to get around it,” he says.

However, not all paid sci-fi magazines have the same problem. Djibril al-Ayad, Editor future fire, he says he hasn’t noticed a spike in spam submissions, which could be due to the small title. “I think the problem is that when the submissions are piled up three times his size and all the AI ​​is terrible and you have to read it, it kind of becomes a denial of service situation. ’ he says. Take the server offline by sending a huge number of data requests.

“In my opinion, there is no need to worry about the danger of accidentally publishing AI-generated fiction,” he says. “If not, well… cool.”