He tried using AI detection tools but found they were lacking. (The detector released by OpenAI, a ChatGPT company, only works for about 1 out of 4 times.) He said unfamiliar turns of phrase in contributions from authors living outside the U.S. whose first language is not English can sometimes confuse such tools. “These detectors are inherently biased,” Clark said.
Clark believes that rapid advances in artificial intelligence will render such detection tools completely ineffective over the next few years. “The AI will write at such a level that you won’t be able to detect it against a normal person,” he said.
At least one person responsible for creating generative artificial intelligence tools shares Clark's concerns. Amit Gupta is the co-founder of Sudowrite, an AI tool for writers that helps you edit, generate story ideas, and complete entire sentences and paragraphs. In an interview with BuzzFeed News, Gupta, who is also a science fiction author and a former Clarkesworld contributor, said what the magazine had to go through was “horrible” and “really disappointing.”
He said something like ChatGPT, which generates large blocks of text from scratch, would be a better tool for creating science fiction content than Sudowrite, which is mainly used for stories that are already in the process of being written. He noted that Sudowrite limits the number of stories you can create with the tool in one day. “But if you just come in and write three stories every day, I don’t think we can stop that use case,” Gupta said. “It seems like there’s too much of a gray area between legal and illegal uses.”
Clark called the entire field of generative AI an “ethical and legal gray area.”
“Who owns these [submitted] works?” he asked. “If I buy one of these, who will I pay? This was not written by a person. The chatbot doesn’t own it.” He also pointed out the lack of transparency about the data these tools are trained on. “Look what's happening in the art world,” he said, referring to the incident when trio of artists sued creators of popular AI image generators who claim the tools were trained in their art without their permission.
But ultimately, Clark says, the real issue isn't how good or bad the text produced by AI tools is. The problem is their speed. “We were buried,” he said. “I never expected a bunch of side hustle gurus to ruin our application system.” Meanwhile, he said: “The irony of being a magazine that publishes science fiction filled with stories written by AI is not lost on me.”
