AI Spam Bot Story Submissions

A Concerning Trend
http://neil-clarke.com/a-concerning-trend/

What I can say is that the number of spam submissions resulting in bans has hit 38% this month. While rejecting and banning these submissions has been simple, it’s growing at a rate that will necessitate changes. To make matters worse, the technology is only going to get better, so detection will become more challenging. (I have no doubt that several rejected stories have already evaded detection or were cases where we simply erred on the side of caution.)

Yes, there are tools out there for detecting plagiarized and machine-written text, but they are prone to false negatives and positives. One of the companies selling these services is even playing both sides, offering a tool to help authors prevent detection. Even if used solely for preliminary scoring and later reviewed by staff, automating these third-party tools into a submissions process would be costly. I don’t think any of the short fiction markets can currently afford the expense.

Clarkesworld Magazine recently had to close submissions because of a rapid increase in AI-generated stories. The problem is not that the AI-generated nature of the stories isn't obvious; it's that this is a ton of spam.

My first response is that this sucks, and I can sympathize. There's been a steady increase in spambots on Twitter and Tumblr since around November 2022, and this month I've been having to report and block several dozen of them a day. A lot of these bots seem like real people at first glance, but their posts are filled with AI-generated junk. Dealing with them is a shitty meaningless chore, and I hate it.

My second response is that it's difficult to talk about how garbage AI-generated text actually is. A lot of people at my university seem to be seriously convinced that software like ChatGPT is the death of the author, which is wild. The reverse-translated passage that Neil Clarke excerpts at the beginning of this post is a good representative of what AI-generated text actually looks like, and I'd hope that this would be enough to convince people not to worry.

American Feelings Yakuza

Must-know for Japanese fandom: the meaning of "proship" and the concept of "proshippers" in Western fandom
https://note.com/orangiah/n/n437e262ce2ce

I've been in my current fandom for almost one year ― I've seen artists who have quit drawing due to harassment for being proshippers, and I know several people who are currently still being harassed. This is not only a problem for fandoms of foreign media ― now that Japanese anime and games are so commonly consumed abroad, it can easily happen to anyone at any time. To antis, it doesn't matter if you are a Japanese person enjoying a Japanese work.

This is a translation of a short essay written by a Japanese artist who draws cute fan art of the video game Omori. It's a good, short, and interesting read that accurately outlines the process of getting harassed in fandom, as well as what to do about it. Essentially: don't engage, and block antis on sight.

In terms of how the harassment happens, it works like this: A concern troll will DM you, saying that you're following the wrong person, or that you used the wrong ship tag, or that you aren't using the right words in your bio. You, sweet summer child that you are, will have a conversation with them. At the end of the conversation, you will block them, but they will already have all the screenshots they need to accuse you of whatever they want. Because you've blocked them, you won't see how they're using these screenshots, and then suddenly you're being harassed by waves of people who seem to be coming out of nowhere.

It's horrifying, and I hate that this is happening to Japanese artists too.