It began with a tweet of a bar graph depicting a sharp rise in the month of February: Neil Clarke, the publisher and editor in chief of the science fiction and fantasy magazine Clarkesworld, had plotted out the publication's past few years of plagiarized and spammy submissions. Until late 2022, the bars are barely visible, but in the past few months--and especially this month--the numbers climb dramatically, mostly due to AI-generated content. Clarke wrote a post laying out the situation entitled "A Concerning Trend." Five days and a massive amount of online chatter later, Clarkesworld announced it's closing submissions for now. Clarke says they've seen this problem growing for a while, but they took the time to analyze the data before talking about it publicly.

One side effect of unlimited content-creation machines--generative AI--is unlimited content. On Monday, the editor of the renowned sci-fi publication Clarkesworld Magazine announced that he had temporarily closed story submissions due to a massive increase in machine-generated stories sent to the publication. In a graph shared on Twitter, Clarkesworld editor Neil Clarke tallied the number of banned writers submitting plagiarized or machine-generated stories. The numbers totaled 500 in February, up from just over 100 in January and a low baseline of around 25 in October 2022. The rise in banned submissions roughly coincides with the release of ChatGPT on November 30, 2022. Large language models (LLM) such as ChatGPT have been trained on millions of books and websites and can author original stories quickly.

A surge in AI-generated spam pitches has forced a prestigious publisher of science fiction short stories to close its submissions, with some joking about the inherent irony given the genre has long covered the perils of machine learning. Neil Clarke, the editor-in-chief of Clarkesworld--an American online Sci-Fi magazine that usually welcomes stories from new writers--shared a blog post addressing an increase in "spammy submissions." While the pitches are genuine, Clarke said the work is not authentic; they are coming from people looking to cash an easy paycheck. Sci-Fi publications have reportedly received the brunt of the deluge in AI-generated submissions, according to TechCrunch. The industry tends to offer higher rates to writers because publishers are required to pay a minimum $0.08 per word, according to the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers Association, regulations that don't apply to other genres. The number of rejections Clarkesworld has issued has surged since the release of AI language models like ChatGPT in December, from 100 in January to over 500 in February so far.

Robots can't write sci-fi – yet Science fiction magazine Clarkesworld has halted story submissions after receiving a growing deluge of AI-generated pieces. The magazine's founding editor, Neil Clarke, says the problem has been created by people promoting surprisingly capable AI language models such as ChatGPT as a way to earn money from fiction publishing – despite the poor quality of the AI stories. "The machine-written submissions we've received are far from publishable quality," he says. "I'm sure there are some that are less detectable, but the majority we've received have been easy for me to identify." Clarke says that he has talked to other magazine editors who currently have the same problem, although he says they have been reluctant to speak to the press – as he was, until the problem grew to unsustainable levels.