One of my sonnets, “2025.01,” has just been published in the second issue of The Alexander Review (if you scroll down, my poem is sixth down or you can “ctrl+f” “Bradley J. Fest” or “2025.01”). But this may be my strangest publication ever because I am not sure that the journal is real.[1]

The Alexander Review is the first journal I have seen that is clearly constructed (and seemingly run?) by artificial intelligence (AI). I am embarrassed to say that I did not notice this upon sending them material, mostly because I generally achieve a kind of fugue state when submitting poems in which I find myself just mindlessly filling out forms, updating my cover letter, formatting poems, repetitive tasks that are more about getting as many submissions out as quickly as possible than about scrutinizing every single detail of every single journal that will (almost surely) be rejecting my work anyway.[2]

But . . . upon acceptance, I did notice that something is seriously up with The Alexander Review. Basically, the journal looks like AI’s “idea” of a journal rather than anything actual human editors and writers might actually make.

Consider:

1) The journal does not appear to have any real people associated with it. All the editorial correspondence I have received, including when I withdrew some poems, has been boilerplate, almost certainly generated by generative artificial intelligence (GenAI), and email replies are from “The Alexander Review Team” rather than a named editor. Further, all the names listed on the masthead of its “About” page are first names with nothing but an initial for a last name and no contact information for anyone. I have been published in a couple avant-garde journals whose editorial team wanted to remain anonymous, so I do understand this, but in my experience, editors usually communicate with their authors personally, using their name and, if applicable, title in any correspondence so that a writer knows who they are working with.

2) The second issue of The Alexander Review’s interface is atrocious, the kind of thoughtless garbage generated by a robot rather than a person who knows what the embodied experience of reading poetry on a phone, tablet, or laptop is like. (I mean, who on Earth would want to scroll down through many poems to find one? And putting a writer’s bio before their work? Jeez.[3])

3) The “people” involved in this journal have some very odd roles for such a clearly small, uncomplicated production. For instance, there are eleven people on The Alexander Review’s “Analytics Team”! I do not know of any journal with an analytics team at all yet alone eleven people doing that work. They also have a “Director of Business Analytics” (for a literary journal!?). This is so clearly not real.

4) The Alexander Review also has a robust Human Resources (HR) department, with at least three people “working” in it. This seems baffling, as this is a free online journal that I imagine produces very little revenue (its submission fee is only three dollars).[4] And if it were a nonprofit—i.e., an organization big enough to have an entire HR department and analytics team—there would have to be all sorts of legalese and indications of partnerships on the site, which are wholly lacking. I do not know any journal of this quality that more than a handful of people are involved in making, let alone a ‍Director of Business Development. And I certainly do not know a journal of this quality that currently advertises (though clearly will not be filling) positions for editorial and marketing interns (that also have no clear instructions on how to apply other an email buried at the bottom of the page).

5) There are also many links on the site that go nowhere or just back to the homepage, including links for “Press Kit,” “Media Requests,” “Brand Assets,” “Logos and Usage,” and “Press Mentions.” There is not a journal on Earth with a link on their site to “Brand Assets” (let alone one that goes nowhere).

6) There is also a “Pillars of Ethics” section, which appears to be something that makes sense on the surface, but the whole thing has the stink of what a large-language model (LLM) might produce (to say nothing about how it seems thoroughly hypocritical to include a “Pillars of Ethics” for a site generated by AI . . .).

7) In publishing their second issue, it appears The Alexander Review also . . . erased other issues of the journal from their site (!), something a human editor . . . certainly would have noticed.

8) And finally, after initially writing this post, I in fact noticed the little button in the corner that says “Made in WebFlow” . . . which is, yes, a service that uses AI to make websites.

‍‍Taken together, not only is it quite obvious that this website is the product of AI (and poorly used AI to boot), it is also nearly impossible to believe that The Alexander Review is the product of real, actual, human labor (other than the poems themselves), and if someone is involved in it, I really cannot see how it is the product of the people it lists on its “About” page. The Alexander Review is thus not only AI generated but a scam.

I am not really sure what to do about this other than draw attention to it.[5] If I had looked at the site more carefully when submitting, I would not have sent them my work. But because I did and because it was accepted (like happens with a real journal—i.e., there may be nothing real about the journal but it does appear to be publishing real writing by real people), the publication of “2025.01” seems like an opportunity to draw attention to something that I find very strange and, frankly, wholly objectionable.

So much of the conversation about GenAI and art so far has been about the art. But what happens when the venues, journals, platforms, and publications for real art become “curated” and “edited” and “constructed” and “published” by robots?[6] It certainly takes away any feeling that the art I produced is in any way worthwhile or that it deserves to be published and read by people, and my work becomes just another instance of the sloppy problem of GenAI, complicit with all the other destructive things GenAI is doing.[7] And then, as a reader, I certainly do not want an AI editor to guide my encounters with art. And, of course, ethically, if The Alexander Review is just AI crap, then it is also just a machine to get those sweet three-dollar submission fees rolling in. (In this, it joins a couple of other sketchy publication ventures of the past decade that were clearly scams/parasitic, basically ways of financially profiting from the submission-fee model without actually having to produce anything.) If The Alexander Review is what I think it is—and there is little-to-no evidence that it is nothing other than an AI robot set up to capture submission fees from naïve writers like myself and to perpetuate the dirtier aspects of the contemporary literary journal ecosystem—then it is objectionable in every way and the writing community should quickly band together and boycott such venues, especially by refusing to submit work to them.[8]

I am sorry I submitted my poetry to The Alexander Review, and I probably should have withdrawn my submission immediately upon seeing what the journal is. But I also thought that not withdrawing my work and actually going through with the publication of “2025.01” and writing this little note could shed a little light on what, to me, is a wholly new phenomenon. I also hope that publishing and drawing attention to how strange this publication actually is might also help other writers and editors resist and eliminate AI’s encroachment into the literary magazine ecosystem and remind us about the importance of humans and human labor not just in the making of art but in its curation, dissemination, exhibition, and publication.

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Notes

[1] That is, “2025.01” is my strangest publication since someone published a poem under my name that I did not in fact “write” (though it was derived from my tweets around December 2022 and January 2023). “Cute Noise Indeed” (2023) appeared in the extremely short-lived journal Who Dis? (2023), which only published around eight or so other things all around the same time, all seemingly derived from the tweets of their purported “authors.” (In particular, mine appears to be some kind of April Fools joke, as it appeared on April 1, 2023.) I am mostly convinced that Who Dis? was run by petro c. k., who edits dadaku (or dada-haiku) and appears to be a practitioner of micropoetry and a proponent of the absurd and the surreal. The link above to the poem also appears to be the only record of “Cute Noise Indeed”’s existence, as the site is no longer functional, and the evidence I gleaned from Twitter in April 2023 about petro c. k.’s potential involvement has been deleted. For more information, see Bradley J. Fest, “‘Cute Noise Indeed’ in Who Dis?,” The Hyperarchival Parallax, April 4, 2023, https://bradleyjfest.com/2023/04/04/cute-noise-indeed-in-who-dis/. I will also say that I am not sure I am opposed to what petro c. k. did, as it is so clearly part of his larger and very intriguing artistic practice (rather than some theft or piracy that generates money for him), and it is flattering to have one’s words reassembled into a poem (even if I did not truly “write” it). Indeed, I wish petro c. k. had not taken Who Dis? down, though I imagine its ongoing existence may have posed legal issues that necessitated its disappearance. Regardless, there is an entire world of difference between what is going on with Who Dis? and The Alexander Review.

[2] Indeed, I am constantly making tiny little errors, say, in my cover letter when moving from template to the next letter and the next because of the automaticity of the process. Submitting poems is a mundane, monotonous task, and so I find myself not wholly present when doing this extremely boring, near-constant labor. That there is something to say here about the creative writing ecosystem that requires such drudgery should be clear, though this post is not the space for that.

[3] Not to mention that they maintained my footnote numbers, but my footnotes are nowhere to be seen.

[4] The Alexander Review also notably uses Google Forms rather than Submittable.

[5] And I have not reached out to The Alexander Review’s editors because, frankly, I do not want to interact with or perpetuate the engagement with GenAI, if that is truly what I have been dealing with so far.

[6] Of course, the words in this sentence are in heavy scare quotes because GenAI cannot do any of these things, not really.

[7] It also points to a bigger problem in the literary ecosystem: Namely, as Ryan Ruby points out, there is a deluge of creative writing coming from journal after journal that no one really reads; or rather, there are far more people writing and publishing poetry than reading it. See Ryan Ruby, Context Collapse: A Poem Containing the History of Poetry (Seven Stories, 2024). That there is an overlap between the entropic textpocalpytic slop of GenAI taking over the internet and the over proliferation of creative writing journals is something that deserves more attention than I can give to it here. On the textpocalpyse, see Matthew Kirschenbaum, “Prepare for the Textpocalpyse,” The Atlantic, March 8, 2023, https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/03/ai-chatgpt-writing-language-models/673318/.

[8] For more of my thoughts on GenAI, see Bradley J. Fest, “Teaching Without Computers” (under consideration). Also see my recent post “Teaching Without Computers.”