Can Authors Use AI? Read What the Literary Journals are Saying.
The AI revolution has been a catalyst of change for many domains, but its effect on the literary world has been the biggest innovation since the printing press. In fact, the only way you know AI didn’t write this piece is because of the number of grammatical errors.
The following is a biopsy of editorial opinions on AI literary submissions, taken from a smattering of respected literary journals, both famous and underground.
Spectrum Magazine has been around since the 1950’s, as part of California’s College of Creative studies, and has published hundreds if not thousands of short stories. Here is their smarmy response.
“Spectrum celebrates originality and at this time does not accept submissions generated by AI.”
Most literary magazines I’ve researched echoes Spectrum Magazine’s statement, with AI being as popular as a lightbulb salesman at an Amish wedding. But most of them aren’t as nice about it. For example, Flash Fiction Magazine’s response to AI is terse, yet effective, as to be expected by a magazine boasting stories under a thousand words.
“We do not accept stories written by AI tools such as Chat GPT. If you submit such stories, we may ban you from submitting to our magazine.”
Small Wonders Magazine, on the other hand, leaves no questions about their feelings on AI unanswered. Their signature is a Hancockian fuck you to the machine.
“When we started the magazine, the two of us talked through what we wanted the magazine to be. We wanted to give authors and poets a chance to say what was on their hearts to an interested audience. We wanted to support those authors and poets to the best of our ability. We wanted to bring pieces to you, the readers, that would surprise and delight you, and ideally make you feel.
AI-written text betrays all three. AI doesn’t write; it picks statistically-likely words with a bit of randomness thrown in to spice things up. Anything it has to “say” is an amalgam of what other people have already said, filtered and smoothed into content slurry. We have limited space in the magazine, which means that any spot we give to AI-written text displaces a human author or poet. Finally, AI-written text has little in the way of new ideas or striking images. Any surprises it brings is due to it juxtaposing ideas that don’t work together or regurgitating previously-written metaphors, and AI companies are working to sand off even those flashes of serendipity.
When new technology appears, it’s worth asking what your end goals are before adopting it. From our standpoint, AI-generated text is anathema to what we want Small Wonders to be.”
— Cislyn and Stephen
Fabulist Magazine will not only ban you, they will also pull your stories retroactively if you are caught cohorting with robots. They also breakdown what actually constitutes AI Usage in the post digital era. If you don’t know, now you do.
“We affirm to our readers and contributors that The Fabulist Magazine is, first and foremost, a venue for connections and encounters with unadulterated human creative works.
• Unless otherwise specified in any given call for submissions, The Fabulist is not open to works that include AI processes of any sort, including the generation of prompts, titles, names, outlines, dialogue, plot elements, descriptive passages, etc.
• We have updated our contractual and submissions materials to reflect this prohibition as clearly as possible.
• This policy is retroactive; we will remove from our archives any works found to have included undisclosed AI adulteration, though, lacking a formal policy prior to this date, we welcome the opportunity to work with previous contributors to update such works or look at new submissions.
• Moving forward, willful violators of this policy will be permanently banned from our pages.
• No, running a spellchecker or grammar tool on your finished text is not AI.”
Metastellar has a don’t ask, don’t tell policy. I laughed at the bit about the mushrooms.
“You don’t have to tell us how you wrote it. And unless we then submit it to a competition that includes AI restrictions in its guidelines, we won’t ask.
However, writers can feel free to add text to their bios saying that, for instance, their stories are completely written by a human, or written with AI help, or dictated to them by talking mushrooms. We won’t judge.”
A journal obsessed with the “labelling and taxonomy of things,” Diagram Magazine seems fairly blasé and unthreatened by AI.
“We are totally okay with AI-assisted work, as long as it rules. If it doesn’t rule, send it somewhere else.”
These poor bastards at Clarkworld, a fledgling Sci fi and Fantasy Magazine, needed to temporarily shut down their submissions portal after being inundated with AI stories. As if the slush pile wasn’t deep enough with human authors.
“We will not consider any submissions written, developed, or assisted by these tools. Attempting to submit these works may result in being banned from submitting works in the future.”
Here is an Ai magazine curated by humans. While I’m usually a fan of contrarians, and enjoy being as difficult as the next prick, It’s hard to say if Curated Ai are embracing a new technology or kissing up to their new overlords.
”We want to read what you have built writes. You can submit your machine-generated short stories, poems, and other works of textual art to submissions@curatedai.com. Please include your name (or nom de machine) and a brief description of what you did to generate the submitted words.”
Here is another pro AI magazine. This one is supported by Harvard, so it must be a great idea.
“AI Mag is a fully AI-generated literary magazine that seeks to challenge the Harvard community’s – and the world’s – conception of what constitutes art and art-making. Through developing a web interface and fine-tuning large generative machine learning models, we enable students across campus to create works of literature and art using AI. This project explores questions about the nature of art, artist, and meaning: Is AI art real art? Who is the creator of AI art? Are intention and effort crucial to the value of art? Beyond examining the human + AI creative process, AI Mag itself explores the interplay between the traditional, elite practices of old-school literary magazines and the open-source, accessible perspectives the AI art community.”
In conclusion, let’s all try to have fun before we’re stuck mining titanium on Mars for our android overseers. Maybe they will let us keep our phones.
Next In Line Magazine 