Popular Sci-Fi Magazine Closes Submissions After Being Hit With AI-Made Stories

If you’re into science fiction, you’d have no doubt heard of the Hugo Award, a literary prize given to the best works in the genre each year. Clarkesworld Magazine is one such publication to have received the award, often receiving over 12,000 submissions per year from budding authors.

Editor Neil Clarke, however, recently tweeted that the magazine was forced to stop accepting any submissions, with the famed sci-fi title receiving up to 35 times as many fake submissions due to the proliferation of artificial intelligence (AI) generators.

In fact, so many “writers” were submitting these AI-authored stories for a chance to be featured in the magazine that Clarke noted he had gotten up to 50 false submissions before it even hit noon on Presidents’ Day.

Submissions are currently closed. It shouldn't be hard to guess why.

— clarkesworld (@clarkesworld) February 20, 2023

While the magazine doesn’t plan to close off submissions forever, and will eventually open it back up again, the issue remains as to how to deal with the influx of AI-generated stories that will no doubt continue to flood its channels and those of other notable publications.

“We don’t have a solution for the problem. 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,” Clarke tweeted.

The editor released a shocking graph of the number of users the magazine has banned by month. Prior to late last year, only a handful of authors were banned due to plagiarism, though that number has now risen exponentially due to machine-generated submissions.

Just to be clear, this is NOT the number of submissions we receive by month. This is the number of people we've had to ban by month. Prior to late 2022, that was mostly plagiarism. Now it's machine-generated submissions. https://t.co/YJdjBOTFmy

— clarkesworld (@clarkesworld) February 21, 2023

With this trend, it’s no surprise publications are worried there will no longer be a sustainable method to keep the doors open for new and upcoming authors while preventing submissions from being inundated with AI-generated content.

If steps are taken to only allow paid submissions, low-income writers could be adversely affected, while AI detectors aren’t quite up to the mark when it comes to accuracy, and are unfortunately prone to false negatives and positives.

7. If you want to support the magazine, the best thing to do is subscribe. Anything we do to fight this will cost us in time or money to acquire tools and with us losing Amazon as a subscription retailer later this year, the timing couldn't be worse. https://t.co/JKayavxpWs

— clarkesworld (@clarkesworld) February 21, 2023

Apart from the rising popularity of AI, Clarke said he felt the rise of fake content was due to the “side-hustle” movement, which may have influenced the public into thinking they could make extra income on the side by submitting AI work. After all, it just takes minutes to generate.

Can the creative industry find a way to deal with the never-ending influx of AI content while protecting the integrity of its platforms? The task certainly seems herculean, but for the sake of organic human creativity, it may be important to try.

[via Gizmodo and Kotaku, cover image via Amber Stevens | Dreamstime.com]