Pinned
Refreshing our list of other places you can connect with us:
clarkesworld
12K posts
clarkesworld
@clarkesworld
Neil Clarke: Editor of Clarkesworld Magazine, The Best Science Fiction of the Year series, and more. 2022 & 2023 Hugo Award Winner.
- Submissions are currently closed. It shouldn't be hard to guess why.
- Just to be clear, this is NOT the number of submissions we receive by month. This is the number of people we've had to ban by month. Prior to late 2022, that was mostly plagiarism. Now it's machine-generated submissions.
- Debated posting it here, but... neil-clarke.com/a-concerning-t… This is a problem for short fiction submissions and it's not just going to go away. The link goes into details, but this is a graph of submission bans since 2019. Plagiarism and bot-written spam.
- In an absolutely devastating announcement (right before the holidays) Amazon has informed us that they are ending their Kindle Subscription program in 2023 and trying to get magazines to switch to Kindle Unlimited. Asking for more details, but this is bad.
- Replying to @jordanjlloydhqNone of the detection tools are reliable enough.
- There have been multiple accusations that the cover art used for our recent issue is AI generated. We have removed and replaced the art while we investigate. The artist did sign a contract that included a statement that the work was not generated or assisted.
- Replying to @clarkesworld5. The people causing the problem are from outside the SF/F community. 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.
- It seems that some people are offended by publications saying they don't want "AI" art or fiction, no matter the reasons behind it. Publishers routinely say they don't want things. In addition to "AI", we don't want photos or horror. Those other groups never complain.
- Five days ago, the chart we shared showed nearly 350 of these submissions. Today, it crossed 500. 50 of them just today, before we closed submissions so we can focus on the legit stories. 10% in less than half a day.
- Replying to @clarkesworld6. 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.
- Replying to @clarkesworld7. If you want to support the magazine, the best thing to do is subscribe. Anything we do to fight this will cost us in time or money to acquire tools and with us losing Amazon as a subscription retailer later this year, the timing couldn't be worse.
- So... I apparently won the Locus Award for Best Editor. Stunned. Thank you to all the voters, readers, and everyone I worked with in 2023. Wow!
- Replying to @clarkesworld2. We don't have a solution for the problem. 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.
