He tried using AI detection tools but found them to be missing. (A detector released by OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, works only with about 1 in 4 times.) He said unfamiliar turns of phrase in submissions from authors based outside the US whose first language is not English can sometimes trip up such tools. “There is an inherent bias in these detectors,” Clarke said.
Clarke believes that rapid advances in AI in the coming years will make these detection tools completely ineffective. “AI will write at such a level that it will not be possible to detect it in a normal human being,” he said.
At least one person responsible for creating generative AI tools shares Clarke’s concerns. Amit Gupta is the co-founder of Sudowrite, an AI tool for writers that helps with editing, generates plot ideas, and completes entire sentences and paragraphs. In an interview with BuzzFeed News, Gupta, who is also a science fiction author and has submitted articles to Clarkesworld several times in the past, said what the magazine was going through was “terrible” and “really disappointing.”
He said that something like ChatGPT, which generates large blocks of text from scratch, would be a better tool for generating sci-fi submissions than Sudowrite, which is primarily used for stories already in the process of being written. He noted that Sudowrite limits the number of stories you can create using the tool in a single day. “But if you came in and wrote three stories every day, I don’t think we could stop that use case,” Gupta said. “That seems like too much of a gray area between legitimate and illegitimate use.”
Clarke called the entire field of generative AI “an ethical and legal gray area.”
“Who is the owner of these [submitted] works?” he asked. “If I buy one of them, who do I pay? The person did not write it. The chatbot is not the owner.” He also pointed out the lack of transparency in the data with which these tools are trained. “Look what is happening in the art world,” he said, referring to a case in which a trio of in-demand artists the creators of popular AI image generators, claiming that the tools had been trained in their art without their permission.
But ultimately, Clarke said, the real issue is not how good or bad the text generated by AI tools is. The problem is its speed. “We were being buried,” he said. “I never expected a bunch of side hustle gurus to take down our submission system.” Meanwhile, he said: “The irony of being a science fiction magazine inundated with stories written by AI is not lost on me.”
