After 17 years as the publisher of short science fiction and fantasy stories at Clarkesworld, the online and print magazine he founded in 2006, Neil Clarke had become adept at winnowing out the occasional plagiarism case from the hundreds of submissions he receives every month.
The problem ticked up during the pandemic's lockdown phase, when workers confined at home were searching for ways to raise income. But it exploded in December, after San Francisco-based OpenAI publicly released its ChatGPT program, an especially sophisticated machine generator of prose.
Clarke reckons that of the 1,200 submissions he received this month, 500 were machine-written. He shut down submission acceptances until at least the end of the month, but he's confident that if he hadn't done so, the artificial pile would have reached parity with legitimate submissions by then — "and more than likely pass it," he says.
