It could be a sci-fi tale itself: a machine using artificial intelligence to try to supplant authors working in the genre, churning out story after story without reaching writer’s block. And now, it seems, 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 they had been inundated with submissions of works of fiction generated by AI chatbots.
“I knew it was coming, but not at the rate that it hit us,” said Sheree Renée Thomas, editor of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, founded in 1949.
The deluge has become so unmanageable that Neil Clarke, the editor of Clarkesworld, said he had stopped accepting submissions until he could better handle the problem.
In an interview on Wednesday, Clarke said that Clarkesworld, which published its first issue in 2006 and pays 12 cents a word, normally receives about 1,100 submissions a month.
But in just a few weeks this month, the magazine received 700 legitimate submissions and 500 typewritten submissions, he said. He said that he had been able to detect the stories generated by the chatbot by examining certain “features” in the documents, writing and submission process.
Mr Clarke declined to be more specific, saying he did not want to give any advantage to those who submitted the stories. The writing is also “bad in spectacular ways,” Clarke said. “They’re just requesting, downloading, pasting, and submitting to a magazine.”
He wrote On twitter that the submissions were largely “driven by ‘hustle’ experts who claim there is easy money to be had with ChatGPT.”
“It’s not going to go away on its own and I don’t have a solution,” Clarke wrote in your blog. “I’m playing with a few, but this isn’t a hit-a-mole game that anyone can ‘win’. The best we can hope for is to salvage enough water to keep us afloat. (As if we needed one more thing to rescue).
The dilemma facing publishers highlights the challenges unleashed by increasingly sophisticated AI chatbots like ChatGTP, which have shown they can write jokes and college essays and attempt medical diagnoses.
Some writers worry that technology may one day disrupt the literary world, dethroning the author as the ultimate source of creativity.
But the stories that flood these magazines seem to be more spammy, easily distinguishable, at least for now, from science fiction created by writers working alone.
Sheila Williams, editor of Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine, said several of the chatbot-generated stories she had received had the same title: “The Last Hope.”
“The people who do this, in general, don’t have a real concept of how to tell a story, and they don’t have any kind of AI either,” Ms Williams said on Wednesday. “You don’t have to finish the first sentence to know it’s not going to be a readable story.”
Ms Thomas said people submitting chatbot-generated stories appeared to be spamming magazines that pay for fiction. Fantasy & Science Fiction Magazine pays up to 12 cents per word, up to 25,000 words.
AI-generated jobs can be killed, Thomas said, though “it’s sad that we even have to waste time on that.”
“It doesn’t sound like a natural narrative,” he said. “There are very strange glitches and things that make it obvious that it’s robotic.”
Ms Thomas said she had been permanently banning anyone submitting chatbot-generated work.
“I don’t want to read bot stories,” he said. “I want to read stories that come from imagination and real experiences, and from their own impulses.”
Clarke, whose magazine typically publishes six to eight works of original fiction per issue, described her frustrations with chatbot-generated stories in a blog post titled “A worrying trend”, and in a Twitter thread.
Explaining her concerns in the interview, Clarke said chatbot-generated fiction could raise ethical and legal questions, if it ever passes the literary test. She said he didn’t want to pay “for the work the algorithm did” on stories generated by someone who had entered prompts into an algorithm.
“Who does that belong to, technically?” said Mr. Clarke. “Right now, we are still in the early days of this technology and there are a lot of unanswered questions.”
Ms Williams said submissions to Asimov had increased from an average of around 750 a month to more than 1,000 this month, almost entirely due to chatbot-generated stories. She said it had taken her a long time to open, read and delete the stories, which are “super pedestrian.”
Ms Williams said it was possible for writers to use chatbots as a “playful” part of their fiction, but “at the moment, it’s not being used in that way.”
“It’s not that young authors need to worry about being supplanted now,” Ms Williams said. “It is a concern. But he has a way to go, at least. They have not yet become our lords.”
