A popular scifi magazine shut off submissions amid a flood of AI-written slop
We knew the ease of AI content production would fill the internet and the world with junk, but it came as a bit of a surprise just how quickly that happened. In February, less than six months after ChatGPT’s release, a popular science fiction magazine called Clarkesworld shut down submissions because it was hit with a tidal wave of AI content.
The magazine said it had never seen plagiarism or other fraudulent content at such a massive scale. And unsurprisingly, most of it was garbage. Many of the stories even had the same boring title, “The Last Hope.” The magazine’s editor Neil Clarke blamed the problem on internet “side hustle” content creators who promoted the idea that submitting AI articles to magazines was an easy way to make money.
