The major science fiction/fantasy magazine Clarkesworld recently announced that it will be closing submissions for the foreseeable future. Why? A.I. generated stories.

The magazine has long been the recipient of open submissions and is interested in publishing new voices, but because of an influx of poor A.I. written works, is now overwhelmed.

Editor Neil Clarke wrote on Twitter, “Submissions are currently closed. It shouldn’t be hard to guess why.” Clarke said the closure wouldn’t be definite, but also noted with some severity that this will be an ongoing problem and that there’s no evident solution in sight at the moment. He continued in the Twitter thread:

We have some ideas for minimizing it, but the problem isn’t going away. Detectors are unreliable. Pay-to-submit sacrifices too many legit authors. Print submissions are not viable for us. Various third-party tools for identity confirmation are more expensive than magazines can afford and tend to have regional holes. Adopting them would be the same as banning entire countries. We could easily implement a system that only allowed authors that had previously submitted work to us. That would effectively ban new authors, which is not acceptable. They are an essential part of this ecosystem and our future.”

Award-Winning SciFi/Fantasy Magazine Closes Submissions Amidst Avalanche Of AI-Generated Spam | The Daily Wire

This is a sad, frustrating development in the unfolding issue of A.I. plagiarism, as the Tweet expresses. Clarke notes that most of the artificial stories are badly written, but in any case, they are obscuring the human writers who are trying to feature their work in a significant literary journal.