Since the early days of the pandemic, I’ve observed an increase in the number of spammy submissions to Clarkesworld. What I mean by that is that there’s an honest interest in being published, but not in having to do the actual work. Up until recently, these were almost entirely cases of plagiarism, first by replacing the author’s name and then later by use of programs designed to “make it your own.” The latter often results in rather ham-fisted results like this one I received in 2021:
These are the same sentences from the original story, “Human Error” by Raymond F. Jones, published in If (April 1956).
These cases were often easy to spot and infrequent enough that they were only a minor nuisance. Sometimes it would pick up for a month or two, but overall growth was very slow and number of cases stayed low. Anyone caught plagiarizing was banned from future submissions. Some even had the nerve to complain about it. “But I really need the money.”
Towards the end of 2022, there was another spike in plagiarism and then “AI” chatbots started gaining some attention, putting a new tool in their arsenal and encouraging more to give this “side hustle” a try. It quickly got out of hand:
(Note: This is being published on the 15th of February. In 15 days, we’ve more than doubled the total for all of January.)
[Continues. and graph omitted here is visible at the page linked above --TM]
https://socialistjazz.blogspot.com/2023/02/ssw-part-1-robert-arthur-robert-bloch.html