Sci-fi magazines battle a deluge of stories generated by chatbots

While the flood has become a nuisance, the stories are easy to spot. The writing is "spectacularly bad", said an editor.

It could be a sci-fi tale itself: a machine that uses the artificial intelligence to try to supplant authors working in the genre, churning out story after story without ever falling into writer's block. And now it looks like it's happening in real life.

The editors of three science fiction magazines - Clarkesworld, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and Asimov's Science Fiction - said this week that they had been inundated with submissions of fictional works generated by A.I. chatbots.

"I knew this was coming, but not at the rate it hit us," said Sheree Renée Thomas, editor of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, which was founded in 1949.

The deluge became so unmanageable that Neil Clarke, the editor of Clarkesworld, said he had stopped accepting submissions until he could better understand the problem.

In an interview on Wednesday, Mr. Clarke said that Clarkesworld, which published its first issue in 2006 and pays 12 cents a word, receives gen erally about 1,100 submissions a month.

But in just a few weeks this month, the magazine sent out 700 legitimate submissions and 500 machine-written submissions, a-t -he says. He said he was able to spot the stories generated by the chatbot by looking at certain "traits" in the documents, the writing, and the submission process.

M . Clarke declined to be more specific, saying he didn't want to give any advantage to those submitting the stories. The writing is also “spectacularly bad,” Mr. Clarke said. "They just ask, dump, paste and submit to a magazine."

He wrote on Twitter that the submissions were largely "driven by experts in 'side hustle' easy money claims with ChatGPT."

"This won't just go away on its own, and I don't have a solution," wrote Mr. Clarke on his blog. "I tinker with some, but it's not a mole game that anyone can 'win'. The best we can hope for is to scoop up enough water to stay afloat. (Like we had need one more thing to bail out.)"

The conundrum facing publishers underscores the challenges posed by increasingly sophisticated artificial intelligence. chatbots like ChatGTP, which have shown they can write jokes and college essays and attempt medical diagnoses.

Some writers worry that technology will one day disrupt the literary world, dethroning the author as the ultimate source of creativity.

But the stories that flood these magazines are more like spam, easily distinguishable, at least to the instant, science fiction crafted by writers working alone.

Sheila Williams, editor-in-chief of Asimov's Science Fiction magazine, said that many of the stories generated by the chatbot she received all had the same title: "The Last Hope."

"People who do this usually have no real idea how to tell a story, and no kind of AI either." Ms Williams said on Wednesday . "You don't have to finish the first sentence to know it won't be a readable story."

Ms. Thomas said people submitting stories generated by chatbots appeared to be spamming magazines that pay for fiction. The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction pays up to 12 cents per word, up to 25,000 words.

AI-generated works may be culled, a said Ms. Thomas: although "it's just sad that we even have to waste time on it."

"It doesn't feel like natural storytelling," said- she declared. "There are some very strange glitches and things that make it obvious that he...