Today is the three-year anniversary of a major event for indie publishers. On February 15, 2023, Neil Clarke, Award-Winning Editor of Clarkesworld Magazine, documented a flood of AI submissions, leading to the painful decision a few days later to temporarily close online submissions. There was such energetic discussion that Neil also closed comments on his blog post.
A few months later, Sharon Renée Thomas, editor of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, temporarily closed online submissions for the same reason.
That was followed by a flood of closures: sudden “indefinitely closed” notices with no timelines, and submission portals stating new policies about not accepting AI-generated or AI-assisted manuscripts (like WHP). There was also a shift toward editors moving to trusted pipelines (e.g. friends from MFA years) in an attempt to reduce exposure to risk and avoid the detection arms race.
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Catch the rest in “AI, Creativity, and the Three-Fold-Steady-State Literary Economy” on my substack, WildWord Fiction. “First-pass reading has been the mainstay for editorial filtering but is no longer reliable. We used to say, ‘Sounds like AI’ but that’s an outdated heuristic.”
And if you’d like to read my thoughts on “AI and Publishing,” including a useful seven-fold taxonomy of AI-human interaction in literary production, you can catch that on my substack, too.
We’re constantly thinking about AI and publishing at WHP, not least because our nonprofit mothership, Just Horizons Alliance, has a major, well-funded initiative in AI Ethics underway.
Wesley J. Wildman
Publisher
