Clarkesworld closes submissions after AI-story flood

Clarkesworld, a science-fiction and fantasy magazine edited by Neil Clarke, temporarily closed its submissions portal on 20 February 2023 after a surge of machine-generated stories overwhelmed its slush pile. Clarke’s own blog post, “A Concerning Trend,” reported that the magazine had historically banned fewer than 25 submitters a month for plagiarism or spam; in February 2023 that figure passed 500, against a total of roughly 11,500 submissions across all of 2022.

Clarke traced much of the surge not to the science-fiction community but to “side hustle” content promoting large language models as a quick way to earn money, pointing to blogs, YouTube channels and TikToks that listed Clarkesworld as a paying market. He wrote that existing AI-detection tools were unreliable and sometimes flagged genuine work by non-native English speakers, and that requiring a submission fee would exclude legitimate low-income writers — leaving no clean technical fix. NPR reported that the closure was intended to be temporary while Clarke updated the magazine’s submission software.

The episode became a widely cited early example of a publishing venue overwhelmed by the sheer volume of text a language model could produce, rather than by any single act of plagiarism — a problem distinct from AI-assisted writing that human editors judged case by case. Clarkesworld reopened submissions weeks later with revised screening in place, and Clarke continued to publish periodic updates on ban rates as the tools that generated the spam kept improving.