Spam submissions will stop if there is a real cost imposed on the people wasting the magazine's time with passive income/side hustle schemes based on AI, content farms, or whatever.
Assign a token fee, refundable in full as long as the submission meets the stated requirements and doesn't trigger the baloney detector. Even if the story is not accepted for publication, a real writer will get the fee back.
The editor says he has some kind of system to detect bogus submissions, but it apparently doesn't scale or is based on manual review. He has to review the real submissions anyway, so the only ones who end up paying are the content farm/AI spammers.
Assign a token fee, refundable in full as long as the submission meets the stated requirements and doesn't trigger the baloney detector. Even if the story is not accepted for publication, a real writer will get the fee back.
The editor says he has some kind of system to detect bogus submissions, but it apparently doesn't scale or is based on manual review. He has to review the real submissions anyway, so the only ones who end up paying are the content farm/AI spammers.