Sci-fi magazine cuts off submissions after it received over 500 AI-generated stories

In a story that they could have predicted in their own work, a science fiction magazine has asked people to stop sending stories generated by artificial intelligence in the latest sign of apps like ChatGPT gaining prominence.

Clarkesworld, an award-winning sci-fi and fantasy publication based out of New Jersey, has temporarily cut off all submissions because they’ve gotten too many written by AI. 

The irony is not lost on the magazine, which has a robot for a mascot.

Publisher and editor-in-chief Neil Clarke cut everyone off on February 20 after he was able to tell that hundreds of stories were not written by humans.

‘By the time we closed on the 20th, around noon, we had received 700 legitimate submissions and 500 machine-written ones,’ Clarke told NPR. 

While he would not explain how they could tell the stories were made with AI, he generally stated that the writing was obviously poor. 

‘It was increasing at such a rate that we figured that by the end of the month, we would have double the number of submissions we normally have,’ he added. 

‘And that the rate it had been growing from previous months, we were concerned that we had to do something to stop it.’

Clarke notes that his magazine pays its writers, which means people are attempting to grift money for no actual writing work. 

‘There’s a rise of side hustle culture online,’ he said. ‘And some people have followings that say, ‘Hey, you can make some quick money with ChatGPT, and here’s how, and here’s a list of magazines you could submit to.’ And unfortunately, we’re on one of those lists.’

Clarke said the magazine doesn’t yet have an answer to how it is going to deal with the issue, and part of the motivation to speak out was in the hope of crowdsourcing some solutions.

He adds that, as much fantasy work does, it offers a worrisome potential look to the future. 

Publisher and editor-in-chief Neil Clarke (pictured) cut everyone off on February 20 after he was able to tell that hundreds of stories were not written by humans

Clarke notes that his magazine pays its writers, which means people are attempting to grift money for no actual writing work

Clarke said the magazine doesn’t yet have an answer to how it was going to deal with the issue, and part of the motivation to speak out was in the hope of crowdsourcing some solutions

‘But the thing is that science fiction is quite often cautionary, and, you know, we don’t embrace technology just because it exists. We want to make sure that we’re using it right.

‘And there’s some significant legal and ethical issues around this technology that we’re not ready to accept,’ he noted.

Clarkesworld’s Twitter account posted Wednesday that submissions would likely be allowed again ‘sometime next month.’ 

OpenAI invented ChatGPT, a startup co-founded by billionaire and Twitter CEO Elon Musk, and is headquartered in San Francisco.

A system prototype went online on November 30, 2022, and quickly climbed the popularity ladder, garnishing over one million users in its first week.

ChatGPT uses a machine-learning technique called Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF).

This means it learns through interactions with its environment.

The model was trained with 570 GB of data collected from books, web text, Wikipedia articles and other online writings.

ChatGPT launched in November 2022 and has since gained in popularity since. The AI-powered chatbot generates emails, naturally converses with customers and provides patients with medical information

While experts believe ChatGPT will replace Google in as little as two years, the AI-powered chatbot has a different opinion

Chatbots have been filtering into the internet for decades but have only been able to answer simple questions with standard answers.

But ChatGPT is believed to be the future of these systems, carrying out conversations with users through multiple queries, providing lightning-fast responses and generating software code. 

Fears are spreading in Silicon Valley that ChatGPT – the AI chatbot taking the world by storm – could become the globe’s go-to search engine.

Google execs are said to have declared a ‘code red’ over fears its $150-billion-a-year search business monopoly could be wiped out thanks to the Microsoft-backed tool.

Much has been made about ChatGPT’s ability to perform eerily-human professional tasks such as writing emails and resumes. But fears in big tech stem from the fact it can instantly conversationally respond to users’ questions, using data aggregated from the internet.

That’s a worry for search engines that rely on users scrolling and researching themselves, exposing them to advertisements. However, experts have noted that ChatGPT appears to have a liberal bias and its answers are not entirely transparent, which raises doubts about its effectiveness as a search tool.