Award-Winning SciFi/Fantasy Magazine Closes Submissions Amidst Avalanche Of AI-Generated Spam

A leading SciFi/Fantasy fiction magazine is closing submissions because of an avalanche of artificial intelligence-generated spam.

Neil Clarke is the editor-in chief and publisher of Clarkesworld Magazine. Twitter thread Tuesday saw Clarke announce that the magazine would not be open to new submissions temporarily due to poor quality content from AI chatbots. Clarke expressed regret that there are not easy solutions for what could be a growing problem.

“Submissions are currently closed. It shouldn’t be hard to guess why,” Clarke wrote Monday.

Clarke offered more details Tuesday morning. “We aren’t closing the magazine,” He wrote. “Closing submissions means that we aren’t considering stories from authors at this time. We will reopen, but have not set a date.”

“We don’t have a solution for the problem,” Clarke continued to tweet. “We have some ideas for minimizing it, but the problem isn’t going away. Detectors are unreliable. Pay-to-submit sacrifices too many legit authors. Print submissions are not viable for us. Various third-party tools for identity confirmation are more expensive than magazines can afford and tend to have regional holes. Adopting them would be the same as banning entire countries. We could easily implement a system that only allowed authors that had previously submitted work to us. That would effectively ban new authors, which is not acceptable. They are an essential part of this ecosystem and our future.”

Clarke found that the majority of problems were caused outside writers. “The people causing the problem are from outside the SF/F community,” He stated. “Largely driven in by ‘side hustle’ experts making claims of easy money with ChatGPT. They are driving this and deserve some of the disdain shown to the AI developers. Our guidelines already state that we don’t want ‘AI’ written or assisted works. They don’t care. A checkbox on a form won’t stop them. They just lie.”

In a separate blog post Clarke explained on his website that plagiarized submissions increased after 2022. This trend continued to the point where they rose dramatically in 2023 when AI chatbots were more popular. The graph showed that only 25 submissions per month were rejected or banned for plagiarism in October. This number rose to 50 in December and then soared to 350 by February 15, 2023. A graph updated shows that this number has risen to over 500 by February 20.

Clarke acknowledged that AI submissions show obvious patterns but refused to give examples, as he didn’t want to help violators avoid detection or paint legitimate authors with too broad a brush. Clarke also acknowledged that many stories rejected were likely to have evaded AI detections or were the result of editors being cautious. Clarke noted that similar issues have been experienced by other editors of fiction platforms; this phenomenon seems to be primarily targeted at markets with higher-profile and more lucrative words.

Plagiarism is common in the arts, as well as in education. Last week, a Florida high school ChatGPT was used by students in a highly regarded academic program to cheat on essays. A Furman University philosophy professor stated that AI chatbots were the “the future” in December. Future of plagiarism.