Clarkesworld: AI-Generated Submissions Closing the Season’s Science Fiction Gap in the Light of Recent Advances in Chatbot Technology

Last week, the popular science fiction magazine Clarkesworld announced it would temporarily close submissions due to a flood of AI-generated work. In an earlier post, editor Neil Clarke had noted that the magazine banned a lot of authors because they had submitted stories using automated tools. In February alone, Clarkesworld had received 700 submissions written by humans and 500 machine-generated stories, Clarke says.

We figured that the number of submissions would double by the end of the month as it was increasing at such a fast rate. And that the rate it had been growing from previous months, we were concerned that we had to do something to stop it.”

Clarke said the magazine wasn’t revealing the method it was using to identify the AI-generated stories, because it didn’t want to help people game the system, but he said the quality of the writing was very poor.

Artificial intelligence has dominated headlines in recent months, particularly since the launch of ChatGPT in November. The chatbot can answer many questions, but also write some original stories.

How to Make a Quick Buck with ChatGp: The Side Hustle Culture of Modern Science Fiction and the Mascots of a Black Hole

Clarke said magazines like his, which pay contributors for their work, were being targeted by people trying to make a quick buck. He said he had spoken to editors of other magazines that were dealing with the same problem.

“There’s a rise of side hustle culture online,” he said. Some people have followings that say, ‘Hey, you can get some quick money with chatGp, and here’s how, and here’s a list of magazines you could submit to.’ We are on one of those lists.

The magazine didn’t have a solution to how it would deal with the issue, and so part of the motivation to speak out was in the hope that someone else would come up with some solutions.

“I mean, our mascot’s a robot. So, you know, we kind of see the the humor,” he said. Science fiction, which is often cautionary, is why we don’t embrace technology just because it exists. We want to make sure that we’re using it right.

The Last Hope: A Story With AI Generated About Authors and E-mail Addresses That Are Not Mystified, but Myths About Ms. Williams

Since that first submission, Williams has received more than 20 short stories all titled “The Last Hope,” each coming from different author names and email addresses. Williams believes they were all generated using artificial intelligence tools, along with hundreds of other similar submissions that have been overwhelming small publishers in recent months.

Williams does not want writers to worry that he will miss their work because he is inundated with junk. The good stories are obvious before you know it. There is no danger to the mind that crafts the interesting story.

Willams and her team have learned to spot AI-generated works, but the influx of submissions has been frustrating all the same. Outlets like Asimov’s are getting overwhelmed by AI chum, taking up the time of editors and readers and potentially crowding out genuine submissions from newer writers. And the problem could only get worse, as the wider availability of writing bots creates a new genre of get-rich-quick schemes, where literary magazines with open submissions have discovered themselves on the receiving end of a new surface for spammy submissions trying to game the system.

Besides repeating titles, there are certain character names that tend to appear often, Williams says. Sometimes the manuscript has a different title than the online form indicates. Author names often appear to be amalgamations of first and last names. There are instructions in optional cover letters on how to wire money for a story that hasn’t been accepted. At times, the submitter does not bother to replace name with their own.

“I just basically go through them as quickly as I can,” Williams says of the pieces she suspects are AI-generated. “It takes the same amount of time to download a submission, open it, and look at it. And I’d rather be spending that time on the legitimate submissions.”

Most of the publications pay small per-word rates, around 8 to 10 cents, while others pay flat fees of up to a few hundred dollars for accepted pieces. In his post, he stated that there was a high amount of fraudulent submissions but did not name the countries or areas where they came from.

Clarke, who built the submission system his magazine uses, described the AI story spammers’ efforts as “inelegant” — by comparing notes with other editors, Clarke was able to see that the same work was being submitted from the same IP address to multiple publications just minutes apart, often in the order that magazines appear on the lists.

The Flash Fiction Online Editors’ Recommendation: “I’m sorry, I just can’t do that, but I can do it”

People from the community of science fiction and fantasy wouldn’t know that it wouldn’t work. It would be obvious to them that they couldn’t do it and that it wouldn’t work.

The issue goes well beyond science fiction and fantasy publications. Flash Fiction Online accepts a range of genres, including horror and literary fiction. On February 14th, the outlet appended a notice saying it is committed to publishing stories written and edited by humans. We reserve the right to reject any submission that we suspect to be primarily generated or created by language modeling software, ChatGPT, chat bots, or any other AI apps, bots, or software.”

The updated terms were added around the time that FFO received more than 30 submissions from one source within a few days, says Anna Yeatts, publisher and co-editor-in-chief. Each story hit cliches Yeatts had seen in AI-generated work, and each had a unique cover letter, structured and written unlike what the publication normally sees. There were suspicions since January that some work had been created using artificial intelligence.

FFO has published work that has a more conventional writing style and voice that is easy to read for a range of reading levels. For that, Yeatts says stories generated using AI tools could get past baseline requirements.

All of the parts of the story you attempt to look for are in it. The beginning, middle, and end of it is shown here. It has a resolution and characters. The grammar is good,” Yeatts says. The FFO team is working to train staff readers to look for certain story elements as they’re taking a first pass at submissions.

Yeatts isn’t sure what the magazine can do to stop the stories from coming. It would be difficult to upgrade the Submittable plan, which is on a shoestring budget.

“We’ve talked about soliciting stories from other authors, but then that also doesn’t really feel true to who we are as a publication because that’s going to deter new writers,” Yeatts says. We really don’t have good solutions.

Other publishers in the community are keeping an eye on the problem that is forcing other publishers to do something, and are looking at ways to respond. Matthew Kressel, a science fiction writer and creator of Moksha, an online submission system used by dozens of publications, says he’s started hearing from clients who have received spammy submissions that appear to be written using AI tools.

To be able to self-affirm that the work is intelligent is a good first step. “It provides more transparency to the whole thing, because right now there’s a lot of uncertainties.”

Williams is annoyed that she has to use her time to sift through the junk. New authors may be able to see what is happening and may think that editors will never make it to their manuscript.

Is there a side-hustle community out there? How spammers are exploiting the side hustle community (and why they’re shouting out)

The problem has been growing for a while but they only talked about it publicly after analyzing the data. The side-hustle community is the reason they are getting these. Make money by using the chatGppt. They are not even writers for most of the time. They’re just people who are trying to make some money on some of these things, and they’re following people who make it sound like they know what they’re doing.” He believes that what they are hawking is not going to work.

“We’re going to reopen—we have no choice,” Clarke says. They are taking a stance that it will be trial and error. A computer scientist by training and the developer of the site, Clarke stresses that he’s not going to explain the exact technicalities of those trials—why give spammers a step-by-step Changes will be small and targeted at what they have observed in their data collection. A scenario similar to the fight over credit card fraud is what we’re dealing with, he says. “It’s all the same sort of thing. You have to find a way to manage working in a world where these things exist.”

Writers should worry about the amount of garbage in the space, but right now there’s too much to worry about. This is a quantity problem, not a quality problem, he says. “We’re being drowned; they’re being shouted out. I think it’s going to become a problem for a new writer, and I feel bad for them. The number of markets that will take the shortcut to avoid this problem is not zero, and every one of those that happens is a harm to them. They have reason to be upset.