Why are the New York Times and Fortune Writing About Clarkesworld?

Ordinarily science fiction magazines are far below the radar of the general press. Indeed, even within the world of print science fiction--a far smaller world than most people realize, quite at odds with how big science fiction has become in the audiovisual media--they are far from their peak of significance to the field. As with publishing generally the center of the action shifted from periodicals to books, and the magazines have increasingly struggled to stay relevant since, more often than not failing.

Yet Clarkesworld has been much in the news lately, discussed even in places like the New York Times and Fortune--because they are pretty much all that remains of paying opportunities to publish short-form fiction. The fact has put them on the "front-line" with regard to the use--and abuse--of chatbots, as seen in Clarkesworld being inundated with chatbot-generated short story submissions, and as a result ended its open submissions policy.

As it happened, much of the content the Clarkesworld staff received was of very poor quality, and frequently visibly plagiarized--the would-be authors apparently thinking they could have a chatbot whip up anything old thing and then send it along without even giving it a decent going-over. But all the same, the people who did this tried it.

Perhaps in this age of digital submissions we will see editors get a hold of of algorithms designed to spot at least the crummier submissions. However, it is also the case that many expect that chatbots will get better. This may be yet another of those expectations that comes to nothing, as so much of the hype about artificial intelligence-based technologies has. Still, it is worth noting that artificial intelligence developers have as yet had their hardest struggle getting to the point at which AI-powered devices could perform everyday tasks requiring the ability to navigate complex physical environments, eye-hand coordination, manual dexterity, from driving through urban environments to flipping burgers. They seem to have been more successful with tasks not making those demands--such that I can picture them replacing coders before they replace truck drivers, or even restaurant workers. And so it does not seem a great stretch to think that what Clarkesworld has seen may be merely the beginning of that shift that long ago already seemed to me underway, where in a publishing market dominated by long series', tie-ins, "co-authored" books and the rest, rather than just requiring writers to produce a standardized product like machines publishers will simply let the machines churn out the product for the dwindling audience there seems to be for anything that actually has to be read.