Sci-fi magazine overwhelmed by hundreds of AI-generated stories

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Clarkesworld, a subject fabrication magazine, has banned caller communicative submissions aft receiving hundreds of low-quality AI-generated pieces

Technology 22 February 2023

By Matthew Sparkes

Science fabrication mag Clarkesworld has halted communicative submissions aft receiving a increasing deluge of AI-generated pieces. The magazine’s founding editor, Neil Clarke, says the occupation has been created by radical promoting surprisingly susceptible AI connection models specified arsenic ChatGPT arsenic a mode to gain wealth from fabrication publishing – contempt the mediocre prime of the AI stories.

“The machine-written submissions we’ve received are acold from publishable quality,” helium says. “I’m definite determination are immoderate that are little detectable, but the bulk we’ve received person been casual for maine to identify.”

Clarke says that helium has talked to different mag editors who presently person the aforesaid problem, though helium says they person been reluctant to talk to the property – arsenic helium was, until the occupation grew to unsustainable levels.

The mag usually has an unfastened submission argumentation to promote caller writers, but took the determination to adjacent submissions connected 20 February aft receiving 50 AI-generated communicative submissions that day. At that point, Clarkesworld had received 700 morganatic submissions since the commencement of the period and 500 machine-generated ones, with the complaint of summation meaning that AI-generated stories would soon instrumentality over.

Clarke says the summation successful “spammy” submissions began towards the extremity of 2022, the aforesaid clip that accessible ample connection AI models were launched, and person accrued period connected month. “They don’t attraction astir their estimation successful the field. That makes it much similar malware oregon recognition paper fraud and faces akin challenges. We’ll effort to minimise these instances and they volition effort to get astir it,” helium says.

Not each fee-paying subject fabrication magazines person seen the aforesaid problem, however. Djibril al-Ayad, exertion astatine The Future Fire, says that helium has noticed nary spike successful spam submissions, but that whitethorn beryllium down to being a smaller title. “I accidental the occupation is if your submissions heap triples successful size and each the AI worldly is abysmal but inactive has to beryllium read, past it becomes a benignant of denial-of-service onslaught situation,” helium says, referring to attackers who sound servers offline by submitting immense numbers of requests for data.

“My instrumentality would beryllium not to beryllium peculiarly disquieted astir the information of accidentally publishing AI-generated fiction,” helium says, arsenic astir volition beryllium bad. “If it isn’t, past well… cool.”