Clarkesworld Magazine Reportedly Closed Down Submissions Due to Massive Increase in Purportedly AI-Generated Stories

Sci-fi magazine Clarkesworld is reported to have temporarily stopped accepting submissions after receiving an overwhelming increase in purportedly LLM-generated submissions.

Risk classification

• Primary risk domain: 4 Malicious actors
• Primary risk subdomain: 4.3 Fraud, scams, and targeted manipulation

Spammers used ChatGPT to cheat the submission system of Clarkesworld Magazine for personal financial gain, violating the publication's explicit rules against AI-generated content.

Additional risk subdomains

• 6.3 Economic and cultural devaluation of human effort: The flood of AI-generated content devalues human creative writing and disrupts the economic viability of short fiction markets that rely on open submissions.

Causal factors

• Entity: Human
• Intent: Intentional
• Timing: Post-deployment

The incident was caused by human spammers intentionally using ChatGPT to generate and submit stories for financial gain after the model was deployed.

EU AI Act risk tier

• Risk tier: 3 Limited Risk

Limited Risk: ChatGPT is a chatbot and generative AI system. Under the EU AI Act, such systems pose a moderate risk and are subject to transparency obligations to ensure users are aware they are interacting with AI-generated content.

AI system and alleged parties

• AI system: ChatGPT (OpenAI)
• AI purpose: Writing Assistant; Social Media Content Generation
• Behaviour type: Assistant
• Alleged developer: OpenAI
• Alleged deployer: Clarkesworld story submitters
• Alleged harmed parties: Clarkesworld readers, Clarkesworld

Harm severity

Severity ratings are based on this scale.

Highest direct severity in any category: Minor. Severity is scored from Negligible to Catastrophic in each harm category, for harm the reports describe as caused directly or indirectly by the AI system.

• Physical: direct Negligible, indirect Negligible
• Infrastructure: direct Negligible, indirect Negligible
• Property: direct Negligible, indirect Negligible
• Financial: direct Negligible, indirect Negligible
• Environmental: direct Negligible, indirect Negligible
• Malicious content: direct Negligible, indirect Negligible
• Differential treatment: direct Negligible, indirect Negligible
• Civil rights: direct Negligible, indirect Negligible
• Democracy: direct Negligible, indirect Negligible
• Privacy: direct Negligible, indirect Negligible
• Psychological: direct Negligible, indirect Negligible
• Epistemic: direct Minor, indirect Minor
• Child sexual exploitation and abuse: direct Negligible, indirect Negligible

Epistemic

Reported: The report explicitly describes epistemic harm in the form of a massive influx of AI-generated spam stories polluting the literary submission ecosystem.

Directly caused: Over 500 machine-generated submissions were sent to Clarkesworld in February 2023, forcing the magazine to temporarily close submissions.

Indirectly caused: The report notes a broader rise in AI-generated e-books on Amazon, with over 200 titles listing ChatGPT as an author or co-author.

Inferred additional harm: The widespread pollution of the information and publishing ecosystem with low-quality AI-generated text makes it increasingly difficult to verify and discover genuine human-authored creative works.

People affected

• Occurrences reported: 1
• People reportedly harmed: 1
• People reportedly exposed: 500

Potential causes

Management

• Inability to Fund Tools: The magazine cannot afford expensive third-party identity verification.
• Commitment to Open Access: Refusal to use barriers like pay-to-submit that exclude new authors.

Technology

• Generative AI Availability: ChatGPT allows rapid generation of text, enabling mass spam creation.
• Unreliable Detection Tools: AI text detectors are inaccurate, causing false positives and negatives.

Data Inputs

• Dishonest Submission Inputs: Submitters lie about using AI on forms, bypassing guidelines.
• Plagiarized and AI Text: Submissions contain machine-generated or plagiarized stories.

Human Factors

• Get-Rich-Quick Motivation: Spammers are driven by online claims of easy money using ChatGPT.
• Disregard for Rules: Submitters ignore the magazine's explicit ban on AI-assisted work.

Process and Methods

• Always-Open Submissions: Continuous open submission windows attract higher volumes of spam.
• Manual Review Bottleneck: The process relies on manual reading, which cannot scale with AI volume.

Information quality

• Classification confidence: High
• Reason for confidence: The reports are highly detailed and come directly from the affected editor (Neil Clarke) and reputable tech journalism (Ars Technica). They provide specific numbers, dates, and clear descriptions of the operational impact on the magazine.
• Ambiguities identified: The exact methods used by the editor to detect and ban AI-generated submissions are kept confidential to prevent spammers from bypassing them.
• Alternative interpretations: The incident could be viewed purely as a spam/moderation challenge rather than an AI safety issue, but the central role of generative AI capabilities makes it a clear AI safety and dual-use risk.

An influx of ChatGPT-generated submissions forced Clarkesworld Magazine to temporarily close its portal. While highlighting the challenges of managing mass-produced AI content, the incident is a localized commercial and moderation issue with negligible implications for national security.

• Overall national security impact: Negligible
• Scope: Multiple nations
• Primary target: United States
• Other affected: International literary community
• Alleged perpetrator: Individuals

Threat characteristics

• Imminence: Long-term. The issue represents an ongoing, strategic challenge regarding the proliferation of low-quality generative AI content rather than an immediate national security crisis.
• Autonomy: Human-controlled. The AI system was used as a tool by human spammers who initiated and executed the submissions manually or via basic automation.
• Novelty: Evolved capability. This represents a significant advancement in the scale and speed of automated text spam, leveraging newly released large language model capabilities.

Impact by dimension

• Physical security: Negligible. The incident involved text generation for a literary magazine and posed no threat to physical systems, infrastructure, or human safety.
• Information security: Negligible. While involving AI-generated content, this was financial spam targeting a publisher, not a coordinated state-sponsored disinformation campaign or intelligence compromise.
• Sovereignty: Negligible. No government operations, electoral systems, or sovereign state decisions were affected by this incident.
• Economic security: Negligible. The economic impact was limited to operational strain on a single private literary publication and did not threaten strategic industries or national economic security.
• Societal stability: Negligible. The incident caused minor disruption to the sci-fi publishing community but had no systemic impact on societal stability, civil liberties, or human rights.