on friday, SFWA (science fiction & fantasy writers association, a professional organization for sff writers) sent an email to members outlining the new AI policy for the nebula awards. it was hot garbage.

(as a side note, i was a member of SFWA for two years and have not been one for nearly three years. current members posted about this on bluesky and various other platforms.)

the new policy was essentially “tell us if you used AI and we will tell voters.” it took about two hours for them to issue a statement (presumably after calling an emergency meeting) saying oopsies, the new-new policy is “tell us if you used AI and we will disqualify you.” i don’t want to discuss the policy, but what happened next.

i reposted my mutual meg elison on bluesky, where she’d posted screenshots of the capitulation. (for added context, meg has a much larger following than i do.) then i made the mistake of reading the replies to her post, where someone had asked if using chatgpt for research and brainstorming, but not the actual writing, counted.

i replied: “chatgpt is not capable of doing those things. it will spit out plagiarized slop and if you use that slop to inform your writing, well, what does that say about you?”

that should have been the end of it. a stupid question from her and a rude (but fully accurate) response from me. but no, she had to tell me that she needed chatgpt to tell her what gods and goddesses are associated with the moon and/or cats, and how else would i find out such a thing? WELL. i have a cp with a master’s in religious studies from harvard, and i also have a whole shelf of mythology books, and! if those were not satisfactory! i know how to go to the library.

she kept going, because it’s the internet so of course she did. i disengaged when she called me a luddite, not because she’d won (she fundamentally misunderstands the luddites if she thinks that’s an insult) but because i was laughing too hard and by the time i stopped i’d come to my senses about getting into fights on the internet. but the conversation continued in my mentions, with other people engaging and her making it very clear that she doesn’t know how to research, even at a surface level. there is an entire wikipedia page of moon goddesses, and her response was that she doesn’t have time to read all of them to find out which ones are also associated with cats.

friends, she doesn’t know about ctrl/command+f. she is a lost cause.

but one thing she said made me want to write about this: she said she doesn’t spend time on research because that’s wasted time when she could be writing.

this is extremely backward. the parts she doesn’t want to do are the work.

people often say they hate writing but love having written. i have long railed against this sentiment because i love writing, especially drafting, but the other day i figured it out in a moment of clarity: those people probably think “writing” only means drafting. this is wrong.

writing is thinking.

writing is outlining (if you outline).

writing is research.

writing is reading.

writing is rewriting, revising, editing.

writing is staring into the middle distance until your family asks if you’re okay, because you were thinking about a character—a little guy that you made up in your head—as though they’re a real person.

writing is having an idea in the shower, turning off the water, and fumbling for your phone to jot it down.

writing is being stuck and burned out and certain you’ll never get it right.

writing is taking a week off and watching three seasons of the worst reality show you’ve ever seen until your anxiety calms down and the surface of your brain is as smooth as highly glazed porcelain.

writing is calling a friend and venting about a plot problem, brainstorming solutions until the answer comes to you two days later while you’re driving.

no LLM can do that for you. (i mean, except for the part where your brain is smooth. they do make you stupid. that’s not what i meant though.)

xxoo,
annika