Clarkesworld shut submissions in a single morning over AI spam

On February 20, 2023, the science-fiction magazine Clarkesworld closed open submissions because of a surge in machine-generated stories. In his post “A Concerning Trend,” editor Neil Clarke described monthly bans for prohibited-behavior submissions climbing from a couple dozen at the end of 2022 to hundreds, with more than fifty arriving in a single morning before he shut the door around noon. Clarke tied the surge directly to “‘AI’ chatbots” and online “side hustle” tutorials that encouraged opportunists to mass-submit auto-written stories, and he declined to publish his detection method to avoid helping the spammers evade it.