A top science fiction magazine announced that it might now not accept submissions after it was flooded with AI- or ChatGPT-generated stories.
“Up to now 10 years we’ve only closed submissions for software or server updates,” Clarkesworld magazine founder Neil Clarke told FOX Business. “We didn’t even close after my heart attack in 2012.
“We’re still discussing this with people and evaluating our options,” he added. “The tools designed to detect these works have proven unreliable against our test data, so we’d like to seek out other alternatives.”
ChatGPT and its growing competitors are a part of a fresh wave of sophisticated computer intelligence called generative AI, that are systems that may produce content from text to pictures.
Clarkesworld, which repeatedly publishes fiction from award-winning science fiction and fantasy writers, fully closed its submissions on Tuesday after seeing a continued spike in chatbot-generated submissions. Clarke first raised concerns over a rise in bot-written story submissions after noticing a rise in submissions in October after tools designed to detect plagiarism flagged more stories than usual.
The magazine has been a launching pad for award-winning writers and repeatedly publishes work from well-established authors within the industry.
“There’s an issue for brief fiction submissions, and it’s not only going to go away,” Clarkesworld tweeted last week, posting a graph that showed they’d seen a jump in banned submissions – stories either dismissed as a consequence of plagiarism or because they were “bot-written.”
Authors using Chat GPT tried to make use of the software to submit as much as $2,600 value of writing to this magazine. NurPhoto via Getty Images
“It’s clear that business as usual won’t be sustainable, and I worry that this path will result in an increased variety of barriers for brand new and international authors,” Clarke explained in a subsequent blog post. “Short fiction needs these people.”
Publication in Clarkesworld is proscribed to 22,000 words maximum, with a payment of $.12 per word – meaning an writer could make as much as around $2,600 with publication.
The magazine had seen a jump in bot-written stories starting in the previous couple of months of 2022, but submissions spiked with the discharge of ChatGPT and other AI programs, with the variety of entries doubling every month until hitting a watershed in February.
“In 15 days, we’ve greater than doubled the overall for all of January,” Clarke wrote, posting a graph that showed around 115-120 banned stories in January and almost 350 in February by that point – which accounted for around 38% of all submissions. Only one week later, the number had reached 500 stories.
Clarke noted that such cases had been “infrequent enough” previously, and he considered them “only a minor nuisance.”
“Overall growth was very slow and variety of cases stayed low. Anyone caught plagiarizing was banned from future submissions,” he explained, adding that authors would then complain that they “really want the cash” that comes with a printed story.
Clarke refused to elucidate how he was picking out the brand new AI-made stories, saying he had “no intention of helping these people turn into less prone to be caught” and that the magazine’s process will “need to change” to cope with the brand new tools on the disposal of fraudsters.
He suggested a lot of changes which may occur, comparable to limited submission windows and even asking authors to offer more contact information – and even outright refusing a submission that has a masked or VPN-covered location. Still, he viewed such options as either “short-lived” or said they may make it too difficult for brand new authors, especially those in international markets.
“If the sphere can’t discover a option to address this example, things will begin to interrupt,” Clarke concluded.