Report 2837

Submissions are currently closed. It shouldn't be hard to guess why.

It's no longer possible for me to keep up with the responses to this tweet and the others. Want to put a few things out there:

1. We aren't closing the magazine. Closing submissions means that we aren't considering stories from authors at this time. We will reopen, but have not set a date.
2. We don't have a solution for the problem. We have some ideas for minimizing it, but the problem isn't going away. Detectors are unreliable. Pay-to-submit sacrifices too many legit authors. Print submissions are not viable for us.
3. Various third-party tools for identity confirmation are more expensive than magazines can afford and tend to have regional holes. Adopting them would be the same as banning entire countries.
4. We could easily implement a system that only allowed authors that had previously submitted work to us. That would effectively ban new authors, which is not acceptable. They are an essential part of this ecosystem and our future.
5. The people causing the problem are from outside the SF/F community. Largely driven in by "side hustle" experts making claims of easy money with ChatGPT. They are driving this and deserve some of the disdain shown to the AI developers.
6. Our guidelines already state that we don't want "AI" written or assisted works. They don't care. A checkbox on a form won't stop them. They just lie.
7. If you want to support the magazine, the best thing to do is subscribe. Anything we do to fight this will cost us in time or money to acquire tools and with us losing Amazon as a subscription retailer later this year, the timing couldn't be worse.