The United States-based magazine Clarkesworld — one of the rare paying publishers of science fiction and fantasy short stories — has announced it is no longer accepting submissions after receiving an overwhelming number of story pitches generated by Artificial Intelligence (AI).

In a recent blogpost, the magazine’s editor-in-chief Neil Clarke writes that, typically, Clarkesworld receives around 10 submissions a month that appear either “plagiarised” or “machine-written.” Since the arrival of certain writing software, that number has shot into the hundreds.

Within four days of its launch on Nov 30, 2022, the software ChatGPT had amassed one million users. By January 2023, 100 million users were recorded. Clarke states that, in January this year, Clarkesworld received 100 submissions that were determined to be machine-written. In just the first 20 days of February, 500 submissions were received, vetted and their “authors” subsequently banned.

“The people causing the problem are from outside the [science fiction and fantasy] community,” Clarke stated in a Twitter post. “Largely driven in by ‘side hustle’ experts making claims of easy money with ChatGPT, they are driving this and deserve some of the disdain shown to the AI developers.”

He further tweeted, “Our guidelines already state that we don’t want ‘AI’ written or assisted works. They don’t care. A checkbox on a form won’t stop them. They just lie.”

Controversies surrounding creative output are not limited to the written word. In September 2022, video game designer Jason Allen won the Colorado State Fair’s digital art competition with an entry he did not actually create.

Allen entered keywords and phrases into Midjourney, a computer programme that converts text descriptions into images. The software generated 900 variations, from which Allen chose three and fine-tuned them in PhotoShop. One of the three images, titled ‘Théâtre D’opéra Spatial’ was awarded first place.

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, February 26th, 2023