“Submissions are currently closed. It shouldn’t be hard to guess why.”
This short tweet by Clarkesworld Magazine’s editor Neil Clarke on February 20th 2023 set off an earthquake. People in the tight-knit science fiction and fantasy community guessed what had happened. A few months earlier, stories generated by AI programs had begun spamming magazine’s submissions, as Clarke had already described in his blog. Now the problem had spun out of control.
He added to his tweet, “We don’t have a solution to the problem.”
Ordinarily, Clarkesworld, an online publication, receives about 1,100 submissions each month, but in February 2023, an additional 500+ machine-generated stories appeared in the submissions portal. Clarke has no alternative to reading and considering every submission, he says, because no AI detection tool has the sophistication to sort them out.
Clarkesworld wasn’t alone. In early 2023, other science fiction and fantasy magazines, including Asimov’s Science Fiction, the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and Flash Fiction Online, also had their submission portals targeted by spam. Asimov’s editor, Sheila Williams, reported that submissions went from about 700 a month to 1088, a 55% increase.
The deluge caught the attention of the New York Times, which ran an article about how “it could be a tale from science fiction itself” with machines trying to supplant human authors, although it was actually humans using AI chatbots to try to make a quick buck.
That was last year, and recently Uncanny Magazine has also been hit with massive AI submissions, many of them barely polished AI drafts.
“The deluge is different now,” but it continues unabated, Clarke said at this summer’s World Science Fiction Convention in Glasgow, where he received a Hugo award for Best Short-Form Editor for the third time. His exasperation has grown with the “torment nexus” that he finds himself trapped in. He quietly reopened submissions in mid-March last year, and he’s created a sort of spam filter (which he won’t detail so it can’t be evaded) that he shares with Asimov’s. It moves likely AI stories to the end of the submission line, although they still get read because the filter can make mistakes. He’s banned thousands of spammers.
Clarkesworld and other major science fiction and fantasy publications are easy targets because they maintain online submission systems. I write science fiction, so I use them often. The submission form asks a few questions—usually your name, email address, title of story, word count—and requests a brief cover letter. Then you attach the story file and click Submit. It’s that easy.
It’s meant to be easy. A few quick fixes to complicate the process might thwart spam, but they would create new, burdensome problems. Many literary magazines charge a submission fee, often around $3. Some have very limited submission windows, and a few only accept snail mail submissions. As a result, they’ve generally escaped the onslaught so far.
Jason Sanford, a journalist who covers the science fiction genre and who founded the literary magazine storySouth, says those solutions won’t work for science fiction because the genre tries to be open to writers of all backgrounds. “Submission fees and snail mail-only submission policies greatly limit who can submit to magazines,” he says, “essentially locking out authors from developing countries along with those writers with limited incomes and certain disabilities. Magazines that do this will also find themselves not receiving as many submissions from younger generations of writers, who rightfully expect to be able to submit their works electronically.”
Clarke fears that charging a fee would result in credit card fraud by scammers, “which would be yet another nightmare.” More than that, he says, “Submission fees are culturally unacceptable in science fiction and fantasy. Money is supposed to flow towards the author, Yog’s Law, and many authors would rightly stop submitting work even if we waived the fee for them.”
The fact that money flows toward the author is what attracts spammers, however. Clarkesworld pays 12 cents per word, Asimov’s 8 to 10 cents. As an author published by both, I’ve never earned anything approaching minimum wage by selling them short fiction. It takes a lot of work to write a story good enough for those magazines. Short stories are written more for love and glory than for money. But if you can “write” a story in a matter of minutes, the hustle might pay off—or so the scammers hope.
“Essentially,” Sanford says, “there are videos and tutorials being spread online telling people they can make money using ChatGPT and other AI systems to write stories and submit to these places.”
But the quality of machine-written submissions gives them away. Williams says that every AI submission has been dreadful:
There is absolutely no sign of originality or creativity in ChatGPT-generated works. There’s no sense of narrative, no character development, and the ‘plotting’ is practically nonexistent. There is no indication that the ‘writers’ of these works ever read a story, heard some folklore, or watched a TV show. I have never read an original human-authored submission that was as poorly written or as uninteresting as these pieces are.
Yet it’s easy to find people who insist that AIs can replace human creativity. Science fiction itself may have created this problem by depicting machine intelligence as human-like. Isaac Asimov wrote about “robopsychology” in I, Robot in the 1940s. Since then science fiction has created Robby in the television show Lost in Space, Data in Star Trek, R2D2 and C3PO in Star Wars, and HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey, to name just a few. I’ve written about super-human machine intelligence, too, so I bear some blame, and several authors have elevated them into god-like overlord status, as in Frank Herbert’s Dune novels.
So, it’s easy to claim—and perhaps believe—that an AI can create fiction and art, cure cancer, and eliminate your job, all in a matter of seconds, just before it destroys the Earth. Or this might be overhype. In any case, the AI programs are owned and controlled by major multinational corporations. Can we trust them with creativity?
“Experience should have taught us all by now that large corporations are the last entities that should be entrusted with our future, much less with what becomes of human creativity,” says Tonya R. Moore, poetry editor at Solarpunk Magazine, a poetry acquiring editor at FIYAH Magazine of Black Speculative Fiction, and an associate writer at Galactic Journey. “AI is still extremely undeveloped, and large corporations are already using the technology to manipulate and cheat people in the most underhanded ways.”
One concern is copyright. Most AI systems were trained on copyrighted material (including at least one of my books using a pirated copy, so the poor quality of AI writing is a personal embarrassment). AI-generated art and writing might not be eligible for copyright, either, and a magazine can’t buy a work if no one actually owns it.
Courts have yet to rule on copyright questions, but Sanford has concerns about the outcome. “The corporations behind the current crop of AI writing and art programs have trained their programs on stolen works by writers and artists and are actively using these programs to undercut creators,” he says. “The fight over whether or not corporations can freely do this will determine the effect AI has on creativity in the decades to come. If corporations are allowed to build multi-billion dollar empires by looting the world’s creativity and turning that creativity into something only they control, I fear the stories we see will increasingly reflect the priorities of the people who control those corporations.”
Moore is more blunt: “Greed lies at the crux of their motivations, and these large corporations will stop at nothing to make the largest profit at the lowest cost. By throwing AI technology into the mix, they devalue the labor of human beings. They just want to profit obscenely without paying people what they’re worth. If they can get away with using the existence of AI technology as justification for their abhorrent actions, even better.” She says it’s not a “bad machine” problem, it’s a “trash human” problem. And it has a real human cost.
Apex Magazine managing and flash fiction editor Rebecca E. Treasure outlines another problem with AI submissions. “Short fiction isn’t an easy business drowning in money,” she says. “People come to this work out of love and a desire to express themselves and help others do the same, and so when people treat that work with such little respect, and our time with no respect at all, it not only makes our jobs more challenging day to day, but more emotionally difficult.”
Clarke feels the same. “All this nonsense has cost time, money, and mental health,” and he sees two victims in this scam:
We’re clearly one of them, but the other one consists of the people who take the advice of these videos, or worse, take their classes. The real scammers are the people presenting themselves as experts and selling the idea of making money with short fiction. They know it doesn’t work. The real goal is views on their videos and, in some cases, selling a course.
Keir Graff, a Chicago author who often teaches writing to adults and children, doesn’t understand the impulse to use an AI: “Writing is how I make sense of things and feel more human in an increasingly inhumane world, so why would I start with an algorithm? Making art is fundamentally a human activity, a way we can express and explain ourselves to other humans.” Even if AI helped him write a better story, he says, “have I truly become more creative, or just more adept at using a tool? And I do worry it would hurt my creativity—in the same way that habitual GPS use erodes our ability to remember directions, I have no doubt that relying on AI to start a story would impair my ability to finish it unassisted. ”
Instead, Graff suggests another approach. “Too many aspiring writers worry about how they will say something,” Graff says, “when they should worry more about whether they have something to say. The best way to become a writer is to read voraciously, seek new experiences, and feed your curiosity—then write to the best of your ability.”
Moore has similar concerns about creativity in fiction and poetry. “Originality is, ostensibly, being able to create something that has never existed before. Creativity and originality go hand in hand, and this synergy breeds innovation. Innovation requires imagination. AI applications, at their most basic level, are nothing more than glorified search engines that scrape the internet, cannibalizing and churning out existing content in formats that mimic human creativity and originality.”
AI applications aren’t capable of imaginative thinking, at least right now, she says, but she adds, “I think that a century or two from now, humankind will need to do some serious thinking and make crucial decisions about what it means to be sapient beings and how exactly to classify sophisticated synthetic intelligences… but not here, not right now, not with the sum of human knowledge and technology currently within our grasp.”
Right now, she says, AI can serve as a convenient scapegoat for human greed, ill will, and misdeeds. In science fiction, however, an AI might someday have the ability and free will for true creativity. “I can easily imagine new mediums and genres of poetry and prose emerging,” she says. “Literature, music, or art that AI could synthesize from mathematical equations, quantum physics, and advanced technology could possibly supersede anything we’re currently capable of even imagining.” She remembers feeling inspired as an 11-year-old reading Isaac Asimov’s stories about robots and now likes to imagine a transhumanist culture. “In this scenario, I imagine a world where humans live much longer, surpass disabilities, solve mind-boggling problems, explore outer space without damaging their bodies, and possess an even more incredible wealth of knowledge and artistic prowess than we can currently conceptualize.”
Clarke and Williams hope that writers will not be deterred by worries about the current abuse of AI, and they will continue to send in their stories. “I still peruse everything,” Williams says. Clarke reads every submission, too, and he champions works by new and international authors. That’s why he is determined to continue to provide them with an easy way to submit work. “Short fiction needs these people,” he says. The current situation is complicated, but “it’s not the death of short fiction.”
FICTION
Usurpation
by Sue Burke
Tor Books
October 29th, 2024