This month's editorial looks at the possible ethics issues that could come with introducing a reliable detector to the filtering process of a submissions system. Curious what people think.
clarkesworldmagazine.com/clarke_05_24/
@clarkesworld I am both fascinated to see how you are dealing with this (you seem to be a few steps ahead of a number of scientific journal editors) and sad to see that you are in this position in the first place.
I suspect that to get good detection ability, you likely need to bend a little and tolerate systems that are trained on AI spam, including such spam partly built by cannibalizing real peoples' works.
I wonder if there is some supplemental information you can ask for along with submissions, that functions a bit like a version of the ubiquitous captcha tests, but adapted more specifically for story submissions. I'm not sure what it would be. Perhaps something that requires non-trivial human thought and effort, to be matched up against the submission itself, that could be used for first-round screening.
@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.