Enlarge / An AI-generated image of a robot eagerly writing a submission to Clarkesworld. (credit: Ars Technica)

One side effect of unlimited content-creation machines—generative AI—is unlimited content. On Monday, the editor of the renowned sci-fi publication Clarkesworld Magazine announced that he had temporarily closed story submissions due to a massive increase in machine-generated stories sent to the publication.

In a graph shared on Twitter, Clarkesworld editor Neil Clarke tallied the number of banned writers submitting plagiarized or machine-generated stories. The numbers totaled 500 in February, up from just over 100 in January and a low baseline of around 25 in October 2022. The rise in banned submissions roughly coincides with the release of ChatGPT on November 30, 2022.

A graph provided by Neil Clarke of Clarkesworld Magazine: “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.” (credit: Neil Clarke)

Large language models (LLM) such as ChatGPT have been trained on millions of books and websites and can author original stories quickly. They don’t work autonomously, however, and a human must guide their output with a prompt that the AI model then attempts to automatically complete.