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Online fantasy and science fiction magazine Clarkesworld is drowning in an onslaught of AI-generated slop. And given the proliferation of cheap AI language models, the situation is certain to get worse.
As New York Magazine reports, the outlet's creator Neil Clarke suspected "there was something off" about submissions his magazine was getting by late 2022, around the time OpenAI launched its uber-popular ChatGPT.
Things got so bad by February 2023 that Clarke decided to shut down submissions entirely.
"We had reached the point where we were on track to receive as many generated submissions as legitimate ones," he told NYMag.
Beyond Clarkesworld, the internet has been hit with a tidal wave of AI slop, a word that has come to denote the kind of low-effort spam being spat out by large language models, from made-up authors publishing articles on previously reputable websites to fake product reviews and AI-generated academic papers.
Amazon is also getting flooded with AI-generated books, spawning an entire marketplace of pointless and incoherent stories.
And that has hit the small players, like Clarkesworld, particularly hard, growing into an existential threat with the potential of overpowering the economy of human creativity and original ideas online.
Fiction's Not Dead
Fortunately, with the help of volunteers, Clarke was able to build a "very rude rudimentary spam filter" in the months following the shutdown, he told NYMag.
As to why exactly anybody would want to lazily submit the output of an LLM to a sci-fi magazine remains a bit of a mystery. That is, beyond trying to score the 12 cents a word chosen submissions receive from Clarkesworld.
Clarke also referenced the influencer economy's role in AI hype, suggesting that it's "people waving a bunch of money on YouTube or TikTok videos and saying, 'Oh, you can make money with ChatGPT by doing this.'"
Some scammers are even AI-generating entire websites that are search engine-optimized to lure people into viewing a whole host of ads. Others are looking to sell copies of barely intelligible books on Amazon.
For now, Clarke's spam filter is "holding things at bay," as he told NYMag. But "it’s clear that business as usual won’t be sustainable," as he wrote in a February 2023 blog post titled "A Concerning Trend."
"If the field can’t find a way to address this situation, things will begin to break," he added at the time. "No, it’s not the death of short fiction (please just stop that nonsense), but it is going to complicate things."
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