Major sci-fi magazine halts submissions due to flood of stories written by AI chatbots

Alien starship travelling through deep space viewed from nearby planet surface
(Image credit: Coneyl Jay via Getty Images)

Whereas artificial intelligence has long been the subject of popular science fiction writing, nowadays it's writing it. That's causing a bit of a headache for the editors over at popular sci-fi and fantasy magazine, Clarkesworld. The magazine has put a halt to new short story submissions due to a spectacularly high increase in spam, mostly linked to a rise in popularity of chatbots, such as ChatGPT.

We're not talking about sentient AIs with humanoid bodies walking among us, or all-powerful computers with hauntingly human emotions gone wrong—those which have been written about in sci-fi since well before it was cool and regularly show up on the covers of Clarkesworld. But even today's text-generating algorithms are causing a headache for editors.

Clarkesworld pays for submissions that are accepted into the magazine. The fee is based on the word count at 12¢ per word, meaning that longer submissions, if accepted, could pay out a reasonable cash sum.

Authors hoping to get into the magazine can submit all manner of work for consideration, though there are a few key rules to follow. It's not easy to get your story published in the magazine as a lot of talented people want to do just that. The all-important rule to note here is that Clarkesworld is "not considering stories written, co-written, or assisted by AI at this time."

But that hasn't stopped people from trying.

"Since the early days of the pandemic, I’ve observed an increase in the number of spammy submissions to Clarkesworld," Neil Clarke, editor-in-chief of Clarkesworld writes in a blog post. "... Up until recently, these were almost entirely cases of plagiarism, first by replacing the author’s name and then later by use of programs designed to 'make it your own.'

"These cases were often easy to spot and infrequent enough that they were only a minor nuisance. Sometimes it would pick up for a month or two, but overall growth was very slow and number of cases stayed low."

Then the AI chatbots became a publicly available tool, which has been attributed to a massive spike in attempts to spam the website since.

"Towards the end of 2022, there was another spike in plagiarism and then 'AI' chatbots started gaining some attention, putting a new tool in their arsenal and encouraging more to give this 'side hustle' a try. It quickly got out of hand."

An initial graph put together by Clarke first showed the extent of the issue. The entries since February 15 had already dwarfed January's, and January's spam count already made most of 2022 look paltry by comparison. In a later update, Clarke posted an updated graph from February 20, in which the number of submissions spiked so significantly that it caused Clarke to close submissions temporarily.

There are "some very obvious patterns" that are tell-tale signs of a chatbot-written submission, Clarke notes, but they refuse to go into detail.

"I have no intention of helping those people become less likely to be caught," Clarke says.

"While rejecting and banning these submissions has been simple, it’s growing at a rate that will necessitate changes. To make matters worse, the technology is only going to get better, so detection will become more challenging."

Your next upgrade

(Image credit: Future)

Best CPU for gaming: The top chips from Intel and AMD
Best gaming motherboard: The right boards
Best graphics card: Your perfect pixel-pusher awaits
Best SSD for gaming: Get into the game ahead of the rest

For a small editorial team (or really any editorial team), there's no obvious answer on how to deal with a sudden influx of submissions this massive. That could hurt authors that are submitting stories in good faith and without breaking the mag's rules.

"It’s clear that business as usual won’t be sustainable and I worry that this path will lead to an increased number of barriers for new and international authors. Short fiction needs these people.

"If the field can't find a way to address this situation, things will begin to break."

Whatever your thoughts on these chatbots and other AI tools, there's no doubt that they've changed how many people work and create overnight. There's no going back on this technology, but we don't yet have the answers to how many might cope with what AI generated content might always mean in the real-world, or how we might have to adapt to deal with it. I have a feeling that any submissions-based work on the web will have to formalise their relationship with AI sooner or later, even the good ship PC Gamer.

Jacob Ridley
Managing Editor, Hardware

Jacob earned his first byline writing for his own tech blog. From there, he graduated to professionally breaking things as hardware writer at PCGamesN, and would go on to run the team as hardware editor. He joined PC Gamer's top staff as senior hardware editor before becoming managing editor of the hardware team, and you'll now find him reporting on the latest developments in the technology and gaming industries and testing the newest PC components.

Read more
The OpenAI logo is being displayed on a smartphone with an AI brain visible in the background, in this photo illustration taken in Brussels, Belgium, on January 2, 2024. (Photo illustration by Jonathan Raa/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
OpenAI is working on a new AI model Sam Altman says is ‘good at creative writing’ but to me it reads like a 15-year-old's journal
A digitally generated image of abstract AI chat speech bubbles overlaying a blue digital surface.
We need a better name for AI, or we risk talking past each other until actually intelligent AGI comes home mooing
SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA - NOVEMBER 06: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman speaks during the OpenAI DevDay event on November 06, 2023 in San Francisco, California. Altman delivered the keynote address at the first-ever Open AI DevDay conference.(Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
In a mere decade 'everyone on Earth will be capable of accomplishing more than the most impactful person can today' says OpenAI boss Sam Altman
PC building
ChatGPT vs DeepSeek: which AI can build me a better gaming PC?
Ryan Gosling in Blade Runner: 2049, his face cut up and with a bandage over his nose, bathed in purple light with the blackground a blurry blue
Coder creates an 'infinite maze' to snare AI bots in an act of 'sheer unadulterated rage at how things are going' on the content-scraped web
Images of Nvidia's Blackwell GPU from GTC.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says his company is 'out of GPUs' to which I reply 'welcome to the party, pal'
Latest in AI
Still image of Bastion holding a bird, taken from Microsoft's Copilot for Gaming reveal trailer
Microsoft unveils Copilot for Gaming, an AI-powered 'ultimate gaming sidekick' that will let you talk to your console so you don't have to talk to your friends
BURBANK, CALIFORNIA - AUGUST 15: Protestors attend the SAG-AFTRA Video Game Strike Picket on August 15, 2024 in Burbank, California. (Photo by Lila Seeley/Getty Images)
8 months into their strike, videogame voice actors say the industry's latest proposal is 'filled with alarming loopholes that will leave our members vulnerable to AI abuse'
live action Jimbo the Jester from Balatro holding a playing card and addressing the camera
LocalThunk forbids AI-generated art on the Balatro subreddit: 'I think it does real harm to artists of all kinds'
Aloy
'Creepy,' 'ghastly,' 'rancid': Viewers react to leaked video of Sony's AI-powered Aloy
Seattle, USA - Jul 24, 2022: The South Lake Union Google Headquarter entrance at sunset.
Google is rolling out an even more AI-heavy search engine mode because 'power users want AI responses for even more of their searches'
A digitally generated image of abstract AI chat speech bubbles overlaying a blue digital surface.
We need a better name for AI, or we risk talking past each other until actually intelligent AGI comes home mooing
Latest in News
A photo of an Intel Core Ultra 9 285K processor surrounded by DDR5 memory sticks from Corsair, Kingston, and Lexar
Fresh leak suggests Intel's on-again-off-again Arrow Lake CPU refresh is back on the menu (boys)
A Colorful RTX 5080 and its box
Three lucky folks in India can win the dubious honour of buying an RTX 5080 GPU at Nvidia MSRP
The Facebook 'Like' emoji logo is seen in this photo illustration on 22 August, 2023 in Warsaw, Poland. (Photo by Jaap Arriens/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
Get ready to argue with your weird Uncle on Facebook again. Meta is rolling out its new fact checking solution to it's 190 million users in the United States
Gabe Newell in a Valve promotional video, on a yacht.
Go ahead and complain the discounts aren't as steep as they used to be, but Steam just had its biggest year ever for seasonal sales
Valve Steam Deck OLED handheld PC
'The future of hardware at Valve is bright': Valve celebrates the success of Steam Deck and Steam OS
Key art of the videogame Lunacid, showing a pale, long haired knight in purple armor contemplating a purple, flaming sword surrounded by the different phases of the moon.
One of my favorite indie RPGs is getting a follow-up made with FromSoftware's 25-year-old Super Mario Maker for first person dungeon crawlers