An online editor says he is closing submissions because he received a flood of AI-written stories. Clarkesworld typically pays new writers up to $2,640 if it accepts their news submissions. Its founding editor said the magazine received 500 articles flagged for plagiarism in February alone. Something is loading.
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Fantasy and sci-fi magazine Clarkesworld has stopped receiving submissions after it was overrun with AI-written news.
The online publisher usually accepts short story submissions from new authors and pays them if it publishes their stories. It can pay up to $2,640 per story, at a going rate of 12 cents a word, according to its website.
Among its published authors are Jeff VanderMeer, Peter Watts and Sarah Monette.
But Clarkesworld founding editor Neil Clarke said the magazine received more than 500 submissions flagged for plagiarism in the first 20 days of February.
Typically, the magazine would receive fewer than 30 reported submissions per month, Clarke wrote in a Feb. 15 blog post titled “A Concerning Trend.”
He attributed the increase to the growing popularity of text-based artificial intelligence tools.
“Towards the end of 2022 there was another spike in plagiarism, and then ‘AI’ chatbots started to get attention, putting a new tool in their arsenal and encouraging more to try this ‘side hustler'”, he wrote.
“It quickly got out of control,” Clarke wrote. On Monday, he updated his post to say he had temporarily closed submissions.
He wrote that he noticed “obvious patterns” in the flagged submissions that showed they were likely AI-generated.
However, he declined to share his findings, saying he had “no intention of helping these people become less likely to be taken”.
Clarke wrote that it’s clear that the magazine’s usual business model “will not be sustainable” and that the rise of AI tools “will likely lead to an increased number of hurdles for new and international authors.”
“It’s not just going to go away on its own and I don’t have a solution. I’m tinkering with it, but it’s not a mole game anyone can ‘win’,” Clarke wrote. .
The publisher said it has spoken to other publishers in the publishing market who have also reported seeing a trend of submitting AI-generated stories.
“No, it’s not the death of short fiction (please stop this nonsense), but it will complicate things,” Clarke added.
Meanwhile, Amazon’s Kindle store has seen an increase in e-books crediting OpenAI’s artificial intelligence tool ChatGPT as an author or co-author, reported.
At least 200 of these e-books were on the Amazon marketplace as of mid-February, including poetry collections and even guides on how to use ChatGPT itself, according to the outlet.
Books on the AI tool itself are also proliferating. As of Wednesday, more than 1,000 eBooks containing the term “ChatGPT” in their titles had been published on Amazon’s store in the past 30 days.
An AI-assisted author, fintech product designer Ammaar Reshi, has received widespread backlash after he said he published an illustrated children’s book in December using ChatGPT and Midjourney, an AI art generator.
Reshi said he posted the book to give to friends and was shocked by the angry reaction online.
Clarke did not immediately respond to Insider’s request for comment.