Clarkesworld is a respected science-fiction and fantasy magazine that pays professional rates and accepts open submissions from anyone. On February 20, 2023, its editor and publisher Neil Clarke abruptly closed submissions - something the magazine almost never does - because it was being swamped by machine-generated stories.
In a post titled “A Concerning Trend,” Clarke laid out what had happened. Spam and plagiarized submissions had ticked up at the end of 2022, and then, in his words, “‘AI’ chatbots started gaining some attention, putting a new tool in their arsenal and encouraging more to give this ‘side hustle’ a try.” The volume escalated fast: a chart he shared showed monthly bans for banned-behavior submissions climbing from a couple dozen to hundreds, with a spike of more than fifty in a single morning before he shut the door. The submissions were not coming from the writing community but from people following online get-rich-quick tutorials, and the results were, he wrote, “ham-fisted.”
Clarke deliberately declined to reveal exactly how the magazine spotted the machine-written pieces - “I don’t want to make it easier for the spammers/sloppers to avoid being caught” - and resisted the obvious but harmful fixes. Charging a submission fee would shut out exactly the unknown and low-income writers the open-submission model exists to serve, and AI-detection tools were unreliable. He later built an in-house automated check that acts as “a pressure valve,” routing suspicious submissions for his own human review rather than auto-rejecting them.
Why business readers should care: Clarkesworld is a clean early example of generative AI imposing a cost on an open system not by replacing the work but by flooding the intake channel. The defenders’ dilemma - that the cheap defenses (fees, detectors) punish legitimate users or misfire - is the same one facing email, app stores, and any platform that accepts open contributions.