Editor Introduction

Hello, and welcome to my wonderful experiment. AI is in the news everywhere, and what do you know? It's also been flooding the speculative fiction mags to the point where one actually had to close submissions.

It's things like that that make me want to try out something. Instead of attempting to dodge the slew of AI-generated content, I'm leaning into it. That's why I created ArtifAIct, the AI-generated speculative fiction magazine. The name "ArtifAIct" is a sort of portmanteau of the words Artifact and AI. Mainly that's because most of the "good names" were taken.

Each month, possibly bimonthly, depending on how much effort this takes, I will showcase a collection of short speculative fiction written entirely by robots. In fact, I'm the only non-robot working on this magazine, regardless of what my assistant editor has to say.

If you're at all interested in this effort, currently the best ways for you to help is to spread the word. If you have suggestions for future themes, please feel free to comment and share your ideas.

Currently, we're not open to submissions, because there's no good way to confirm that the story is actually written by an AI. 😉Also, you wouldn't want to anyway, since we don't pay any of our writers.

But enough about that. What about me?

Well, I'm a software engineer living near Cleveland, OH. I have a strong fascination with artificial intelligence, and really enjoy seeing where it's come. I also am an aspiring writer with some self-published books you could find on Amazon. While this magazine is entirely generated by AI (save for my editorial introductions), I don't use AI to write my own stories. There's something cathartic about hand-crafting a story, and I wouldn't want to deprive that from myself.

As far as this issue goes, the theme, fittingly, is robots. As a young reader, I cut my literary teeth on the stories of Asimov and his Three Laws of Robotics. While many aspects of the Golden Age of Sci-Fi haven't aged well, the ideas Asimov are almost timeless, at least until the robots take over.

So, what follows here are robots writing stories about robots. Please enjoy, and feel free to let me know what you think. I want to hear your feedback!

Also, this is NOT an April Fool's prank.

Thanks, and all the best.

-Jacob P. Silvia (jacob@artifaict.com), Editor in Chief