Tried using AI detection tools, but found they were missing. (A detector released by OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, works only around 1 out of 4 times.) He said that unknown turns of phrase in submissions from non-US-based authors whose first language is not English can sometimes trip up such tools. “There is an inherent bias in these detectors,” Clarke said.
Clarke believes that rapid advances in AI in the coming years will render these detection tools totally ineffective. “The AI will write at such a level that you won’t be able to detect it against a normal human,” she said.
At least one person responsible for creating generative AI tools shares Clarke’s concerns. Amit Gupta is the co-founder of Sudowrite, an artificial intelligence tool for writers that helps with edits, generates plot ideas, and completes entire sentences and paragraphs. In an interview with BuzzFeed News, Gupta, who is also a science fiction author and has been featured on Clarkesworld several times in the past, said what the magazine was going through was “terrible” and “really disappointing.”
He said something like ChatGPT, which generates large blocks of text from scratch, would be a better tool for generating sci-fi submissions than Sudowrite, which is mostly used for stories already in the process of being written. He noted that Sudowrite limits the number of stories you can create with the tool in a single day. “But if you come in and write like three stories every day, I don’t think we can stop that use case,” Gupta said. “That feels too much like a gray area between fair and illegitimate use.”
Clarke called the entire field of generative AI “an ethical and legal gray area.”
“Who owns these [submitted] Works?” he asked. “If I buy one of them, who do I pay? The person didn’t write it. The chatbot doesn’t own it.” He also pointed to the lack of transparency in the data these tools are trained on. “Look at what is happening in the art world,” he said, referring to a case in which a trio of artists sued the creators of the popular AI image generators, claiming that the tools had been trained in their art without their permission.
But ultimately, Clarke said, the real issue isn’t how good or bad the text generated by AI tools is. The problem is his speed. “We were being buried,” she said. “I never expected a bunch of hustle gurus to mine our presentation system.” Meanwhile, he said: “The irony of being a sci-fi magazine that is inundated with AI-written stories is not lost on me.”
