Editors of Sci-Fi Magazine Disgusted as

They Realized Submissions Were Filling With AI Slop

“We had reached the point where we were on track to receive as many generated submissions as legitimate ones.”

Online fantasy and science fiction magazine Clarkesworld is drowning in an onslaught of AI-generated slop. Furthermore, the issue will undoubtedly worsen due to the widespread availability of low-cost AI language models.

According to New York Magazine, by late 2022, about the time OpenAI released its wildly successful ChatGPT, Neil Clarke, the magazine’s creator, had a suspicion that “something was off” with the submissions his publication was receiving.

By February 2023, things had gotten so terrible that Clarke had to completely stop accepting applications.
“We had reached the point where we were on track to receive as many generated submissions as legitimate ones,” he stated to NYMag.
Beyond Clarkesworld, a tidal wave of AI slop a term coined to describe the low-effort spam spewed out by large language models has hit the internet. It includes fake product reviews, academic papers generated by AI, and articles published on previously credible websites by made-up authors.

AI-generated novels are also flooding Amazon, creating a whole market for meaningless and nonsensical fiction.

And it has notably hurt the smaller firms, such as Clarkesworld, and grown into an existential threat that might dominate the internet market for human innovation and unique ideas.

Thankfully, in the months that followed the outage, Clarke was able to construct a “very rude rudimentary spam filter” with the aid of volunteers, he told NYMag.

It’s still unclear why exactly someone would want to idly send an LLM’s output to a science fiction publication.

Clarke claims that the AI frenzy is the result of “people waving a bunch of money on YouTube or TikTok videos and saying, ‘Oh, you can make money with ChatGPT by doing this.'” This is known as the influencer economy. This is known as the influencer economy.
Some con artists even utilize artificial intelligence (AI) to create whole websites that are search engine optimized in an attempt to trick users into watching a constant stream of advertisements. Some others want to resell books in hardcover on Amazon.com
Clarke told NYMag that his spam filter is currently “holding things at bay.”

However, as he stated in a blog post titled “A Concerning Trend” from February 2023, “it’s clear that business as usual won’t be sustainable.”
“If the field can’t find a way to address this situation, things will begin to break,” he said at the time. “No, it’s not the death of short fiction (please just stop that nonsense), but it is going to complicate things.”