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In a story they might have predicted in their own work, a sci-fi magazine has asked people to stop submitting AI-generated stories in the latest sign that apps like ChatGPT are gaining prominence.
Clarkesworld, an award-winning New Jersey-based science fiction and fantasy publication, has temporarily cut all submissions because AI has written too many.
The irony is not lost on the magazine, which has a robot as its mascot.
Publisher and editor-in-chief Neil Clarke cut everyone off on February 20 after he was able to say that hundreds of stories were not written by humans.
“When we closed on the 20th, around noon, we had received 700 legitimate submissions and 500 typed submissions,” Clarke told NPR.
Clarkesworld, an award-winning New Jersey-based sci-fi and fantasy publication, has temporarily cut off all submissions because they have received too many AI-written submissions.
While he didn’t explain how they could tell that the stories were made with AI, he generally stated that the writing was obviously poor.
“It was increasing at such a rate that we thought that by the end of the month we would have double the number of presentations that we normally have,” he added.
“And that the rate that had been growing since the previous months, we were concerned that we would have to do something to stop it.”
Clarke points out that his magazine pays its writers, which means that people are trying to scam money without actually writing.
“There’s a rise in hustle culture online,” he said. “And some people have followers who say, ‘Hey, you can make some quick money with ChatGPT, here’s how, and here’s a list of magazines you can submit to.” And unfortunately, we are on one of those lists.
Clarke said the magazine doesn’t yet have an answer on how it’s going to tackle the problem, and part of the motivation for speaking out was hoping to find some solutions through crowdsourcing.
He adds that, like much fantasy work, it offers a potentially troubling look into the future.
Publisher and editor-in-chief Neil Clarke (pictured) cut everyone off on February 20 after he was able to say hundreds of stories weren’t written by humans.
Clarke points out that her magazine pays its writers, which means that people are trying to scam money without any actual writing work.
Clarke said the magazine still doesn’t have an answer on how it was going to tackle the problem, and part of the motivation for speaking out was hoping to find some solutions.
“But the thing is, science fiction is usually cautious and, you know, we don’t embrace technology just because it exists. We want to make sure that we are using it correctly.
“And there are some important legal and ethical questions surrounding this technology that we are not prepared to accept,” he said.
The Clarkesworld Twitter account posted on Wednesday that submissions would likely be allowed again “sometime in the next month”.
OpenAI invented ChatGPT, a startup co-founded by billionaire and Twitter CEO Elon Musk and is based in San Francisco.
A prototype of the system went online on November 30, 2022, and quickly climbed the popularity ladder, amassing over a million users in its first week.
ChatGPT uses a machine learning technique called Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF).
This means that it learns through interactions with its environment.
The model was trained on 570 GB of data collected from books, web text, Wikipedia articles, and other online writings.
ChatGPT was launched in November 2022 and has been growing in popularity ever since. The AI-powered chatbot generates emails, converses naturally with customers, and provides medical information to patients.
While experts believe that ChatGPT will replace Google in just two years, the AI-powered chatbot has a different opinion.
Chatbots have been seeping into the internet for decades, but they have only been able to answer simple questions with standard answers.
But ChatGPT is believed to be the future of such systems, holding conversations with users across multiple queries, providing ultra-fast responses, and generating software code.
Fears are spreading in Silicon Valley that ChatGPT, the world-conquering AI chatbot, could become the world’s search engine.
Google executives are said to have declared a ‘code red’ out of fear that their $150 billion-a-year search business monopoly could be wiped out thanks to the Microsoft-backed tool.
Much has been said about ChatGPT’s ability to perform eerily human professional tasks, such as writing emails and resumes. But fears in big tech stem from the fact that it can instantly answer user questions conversationally, using aggregated data from the Internet.
That’s a concern for search engines that rely on users to scroll and do their own research, exposing them to ads. However, experts have pointed out that ChatGPT seems to have a liberal bias and its responses are not entirely transparent, raising questions about its effectiveness as a search tool.