clarkesworld

clarkesworld, 10 days ago

What it boils down to is the potential common good (helping deprioritize potential spam in submission queues, an effective pressure valve that can keep markets open) a fair trade or is the fact that a partner used other's generated content to build their detector crossing a line.

In this scenario, the people building the detector aren't directly involved in theft from authors. It's trained on the text generated by systems involved in theft. Basically, the children of theft.

clarkesworld, 10 days ago

@grammargirl Yes. The output of a variety of models as well as that of the tools used to evade detection.

clarkesworld, 10 days ago

@aebrockwell At the moment, spam is submitted manually by individuals. CAPTCHA style methods are good for identifying bots. We do use patterns in spammer behavior as part of our current "suspicion" scoring though.

clarkesworld, 10 days ago

@oblomov Huh. Not sure how that vanished. Restored. Thanks!

clarkesworld, 10 days ago

@NormalOperator This is one of the reasons I'm looking for third party tools to supplement what we're doing and make it more reliable. There are limits to what we can do alone.

clarkesworld, 10 days ago

@jotho We're already doing much of that, but validation services are not cheap, can have serious regional limitations, and (with email) would exclude a large number of legitimate authors, including many we've worked with. The email addresses are 99.9% real. The rest are typos. Keep in mind that our spammers are hoping to get paid, so they want to be reachable. Many don't even know they are being told to do something wrong. (A lot is driven by side hustle scams.)

clarkesworld, 8 days ago

@lord_tacitus Yes, and ESL too. I've been talking with developers and evaluating some new tools that (based on my own testing) are much more reliable, even in these situations. Human final review is going to be necessary for the foreseeable future, but these detectors look promising and could significantly improve the things we already do to manage this type of spam.

clarkesworld, 1 month ago

Asking for support comes more easily for some than others, but all the magazines need it. Our community is accustomed to free, but that comes at a cost to the people behind the scenes. All of us deserve better and it costs so little to subscribe.

clarkesworld, 1 month ago

And when the people at the magazines are doing better, readers don't have to worry as much about their favorite venues fading away or imploding.

clarkesworld, 1 month ago

Short fiction has become a majority non-paying audience of readers. It wasn't always like that. The culture changed and there have been benefits. The pendulum, however, is too far to one side and needs to move a bit more towards the middle if we expect things to improve... or be maintained.

clarkesworld, 1 month ago

Value the arts? Support it. Support it as passionately as the "AI" evangelists want us to accept their work as "art"

clarkesworld, 1 month ago

@nkstottlemyer Thank you! Will have to check out your videos.

clarkesworld, 1 month ago

@pinkdrunkenelephants I meant to use quotes on that word too. :)

clarkesworld, 1 month ago

@denebeim Wishing you the best of luck in your job hunt.

clarkesworld, 1 month ago

@owenblacker We would be willing to accept that amendment to our proposal.

clarkesworld, 1 month ago

@EmbraceBecoming Most are fairly obvious to us. When there is any doubt, we just flag it as suspicious and move along. We'd rather err on the side of caution than ban someone.