Major sci-fi magazine halts submissions due to flood of stories written by AI chatbots

pcgamer.com:

Whereas artificial intelligence has long been the subject of popular science fiction writing, nowadays it's writing it. That's causing a bit of a headache for the editors over at popular sci-fi and fantasy magazine, Clarkesworld(opens in new tab). The magazine has put a halt to new short story submissions due to a spectacularly high increase in spam, mostly linked to a rise in popularity of chatbots, such as ChatGPT.

We're not talking about sentient AIs with humanoid bodies walking among us, or all-powerful computers with hauntingly human emotions gone wrong—those which have been written about in sci-fi since well before it was cool and regularly show up on the covers of Clarkesworld. But even today's text-generating algorithms are causing a headache for editors.

Clarkesworld pays for submissions that are accepted into the magazine. The fee is based on the word count at 12¢ per word, meaning that longer submissions, if accepted, could pay out a reasonable cash sum.

Authors hoping to get into the magazine can submit all manner of work for consideration, though there are a few key rules to follow. It's not easy to get your story published in the magazine as a lot of talented people want to do just that. The all-important rule to note here is that Clarkesworld is «not considering stories written, co-written, or assisted by AI at this time.»

But that hasn't stopped people from trying.

«Since the early days of the pandemic, I’ve observed an increase in the number of spammy submissions to Clarkesworld,» Neil Clarke, editor-in-chief of Clarkesworld writes in a blog post.(opens in new tab) "… Up until recently, these were almost entirely cases of plagiarism, first by replacing the author’s name and then later by use of programs