Sure, but these are people who say things like “please send us a dollar or more a month so that Neil can afford health insurance.” and “I’m sorry this month’s podcast is late, my microphone broke.”
How much money and time can they devote to setting up and implementing a system for managing spam submissions? They will have to come up with something, but I’m pissed off on their behalf that they are being preyed upon by lazy MFers.
That’s pretty much it.
It’s basically a step up from a fanzine. It’s offered for free online (print version does cost but they also get by on donations and advertising). So it most assuredly does not provide enough for the limited staff to live on.
They all have day jobs. Even Neil Clarke makes most of his income editing and publishing anthologies as well as books by other authors rather than through Clarkesworld. That doesn’t really leave a lot of time, hence shutting down the system entirely while he figures things out.
I suppose I didn’t realize that they were such a failing business. Sounds like this is less killing them and more just putting some finishing touches on their coffin.
Lazy, sure, but I don’t know that I would call it predatory behavior.
I’ve long been of the opinion that everyone has at least one interesting story to tell, but a lack of time and skill hold them back from ever sharing that.
Now a tool has come along that they think will help them express their thoughts. Sure, it has become overused, as there are a whole lot of people with an idea for a story, but lots of people using something doesn’t make it abuse.
One person spamming them with hundreds of stories is abuse. Hundreds of people submitting their one story isn’t, IMHO.
This is probably the disconnect. It’s only technically a business and was never really intended to be a profit generating enterprise.
It started as one guy pursuing a personal interest and went on from there. You can even read their issues for free online and always could.
In a related issue, author Doris V. Sutherland has reviewed some AI-written stories from an anthology of AI-written stories.
The results do not look good. I suspect at some point people will get around to making an AI that will write good stories, but what we have now does not seem to be it.
The Times had a big article about this in the Business section today, with quotes from Neil, Sheila Williams and Sheree Renee Thomas, whose quote is quote of the day. (!!) Clarke said the writing was bad “in spectacular ways” Sheila Williams said that several of the stories she received had the same title (The Last Hope.) She also said that you didn’t have to finish the first sentence to know that it wasn’t a readable story.
So maybe the bot isn’t quite as good as those sending in stories think it is. Or as the media has made it out to be.
Ideas are the easiest part of a story. And there are very few new ideas out there.
The “lack of time” just means you’re not willing to prioritize your time for writing. I managed to write fiction when I was working and going for a Master’s degree. It’s not hard to carve out a half-hour a day to write.
And using the time means you’re improving your skills.
You have a story worth telling? Then write it.
Yeesh. Those stories make RL Stine look like HP Lovecraft.
If that is the case, why not charge a deposit, say, $50 for each submission, and then refund it to the author if the editors determine it to be not AI-generated? If they don’t have enough manpower to process the volume of submissions, then they can farm it out to Fiverr or other freelancing platform.
Is it because of the hassles in processing refunds over payment networks, or financial regulations, or some other factor?
…because the people that run the site don’t want to discourage new and undiscovered authors from submitting. A deposit is a clear disincentive, even if refundable.
Short stories are high in prestige and low in profit. This is true across the literary spectrum. Maybe a half dozen major magazines buy a mainstream story an issue. Otherwise the market is made up of tiny literary magazines which are full of young writers hoping to score a novel contract.
Genre magazines peaked in circulation in the 1980s and have fallen 90% since. They’ve traditionally had an editor/publisher, an assistant, and a young kid to read slush. They were the mom-and-pop stores to the big boxes of publishing conglomerates. Some gave the editor a living; most needed a full-time job. Dozens, if not hundreds, of genre magazines simply vanished. Any little thing could push them off the cliff.
I have sympathy for John W. Campbell, who had tremendous personal flaws, because I believe him when he said he read more bad science fiction than any other human. A flood of time-wasting fake submissions could kill any magazine. This is an existential crisis.
Hmm. A puppy plot?
A secondary problem is that most writers have to go through multiple stories submitted before there’s an acceptance. I had 60 rejections before I sold my first story. That many rejections can be discouraging enough, but having to spend $3000 beforehand would have put an end to any dream of writing.
The magazine can refund after each rejection (once it is determined to be not from an AI), there’s no requirement that it batches up the refunds until the writer finally has a story accepted, which may never happen.
But I agree, if their policy was the latter one, then no undiscovered writers would ever make a submission to the magazine.
For that to work, they would have to be able to determine, quickly and accurately, whether a submission was AI-generated or not. I think it would be easy to distinguish between a publishable story and an AI-generated one, but I suspect that it is not always easy to tell whether a bad story is AI-generated or not. What do you do when someone inevitably insists, “No, I wrote that steaming pile of garbage all on my own”?
Hmm … yeah, I don’t have a good answer for that. I guess there needs to be effective AI filters that Voyager was talking about earlier in this thread, before my proposed policy can be implemented.
Until such AI filters are developed, if the writer of the bad story makes an appeal to the magazine, then the magazine gives them the benefit of the doubt and refunds them anyway. However, the writer is then put in a “time-out” period (I dunno, maybe 3 months is a good number) before they can make their next submission.
This is akin to the practice of API rate-limiting in the software world, which prevents bots and spammers from overwhelming the API with requests.
Could be.
But who has the courage to go over there and wade through the brain muck to find out?
Good point. But the author would have to pay the fee for $50 deposit, whether a credit card or PayPal. And the editorial site would have to be modified to take the fee. And there would have to be something to let established authors submit without it. And someone would have to be running this.
I suspect the time to process all the fees would be greater than the time to reject the crap.
Now sure, the fees would discourage bots, but they’ll come back the moment you lift the requirement, so you wind up annoying all the real writers and none of the fake ones.