[Editing here to note that the HWA has removed this board member as of this afternoon. I’ll post the full text of that in the comments below.]
Today I, and every other HWA member, received the HWA newsletter in our inboxes. In that newsletter was an essay (“essay”) of pro-AI propaganda that made a number of specious points in an effort to, I guess, get us all to stop judging those who might use AI in their writing work and careers.
This is, of course, incredibly disappointing to see. This is a professional writer’s organization. It is the Horror Writer’s Association, not the Horror Prompter’s Association. A writer’s organization should be geared toward the act, the art, the craft, and the business of writing, not slop-wrangling and prompt-engineering using the shitty sparkling autocorrect of LLMs. It is grotesque to have pro-AI (“AI”) propaganda sent to us, the people whose necks are first under the boots of the AI companies. We are the people that have had all our work stolen immorally and illegally. We’re the ones turned into Soylent Green, so it’s a little fucking rude to have an essay piped hot and fresh into our inboxes that dares to be mad at us for criticizing anyone who eats Soylent Green. We’re getting cannibalized, turned into sausages, and you’re mad that we’re mad about it.
And when I say “you’re” mad, I don’t necessarily assume this is the Official Word of the HWA — already I’m seeing the rumbles that it most certainly is not, that they’re looking for ways to correct this. But the damage is done. The author, Sèphera Girón, is a trustee of the HWA, and saw fit to write what reads ultimately like an ill-thought-out tantrum and not a well-reasoned (if still disagreeable) pro-AI message. And so, regardless of how official this is, or isn’t, it’s disappointing that it ever made it out the door in the first place.
The “essay” is not something posted online, but you can find it online. One spot is here, on Bluesky, posted by author Holly Lyn Walrath.
On the one hand I don’t even know if the essay is worth legitimizing by taking it to task. On the other hand, it seems that its POV isn’t even “wow, AI is so great,” and more “wow, stop being mean about AI.” It attempts to take to task so-called “gatekeepers” and “bullies.”
So, I’m just going to go ahead and take some of the pieces from this essay and talk about how I feel these things are, at best, misguided, and at worst, poisonous notions about how stories are told and art is made.
“Technology keeps changing, oh-so-rapidly these days. We went from screaming about having to pump our own gas to screaming about self-checkouts. Back in the day, film studios were upset at the invention of home television sets, musicians were upset about electric guitars and synthesizers, filmmakers were upset about YouTube, visual artists were upset about photography, photographers were upset about Photoshop, and now writers are screaming about AI.”
I don’t know that pumping gas and self check-outs are relevant technological innovations here, but okay. But talking about film vs TV, electric instruments, photography, and so forth, leads into an argument that pro-AI (“AI” — again, we’re talking LLMs and what Tobias Buckell calls LIMs, Large Image Models) really like to use a lot, which is, “You stupid Luddite, you’re just afraid of the new technology.” And then sometimes they say something about horse-and-buggy versus the car, or some other false equivalency.
(Also, please look up the actual story of the Luddites.)
The reason all of this is false equivalency is that prompting your way to art or to writing is not the same as having a new tool that allows you to make art or tell a story. AI, here, is not a tool —
It’s not allowing you to do the work. You’re allowing it to do the work. Which is to say, you’re the tool.
The AI makes decisions. (Not literally. AI isn’t smart. It knows nothing. But programmatically, it takes pathways based on the chaos of its code.) You don’t make the decisions. You may guide them. But you don’t make them.
Look at it this way — if I have a camera, and I want to take a photo of a butterfly, I can do that. I can grab my camera. I can find a butterfly. I can track it, trying not to startle it, I can choose how to frame the shot in the chaos of that moment, I can choose how close I’m zoomed in, I can take one photo or a hundred. Then I can take the photos that I chose to take and do more work — cropping, adding contrast, modifying sharpness, whatever. Or I can take the photo and then choose to paint it, instead, using it as reference. Whatever. I have a lot of choices there, and they are choices born of the effort — and that multiply with greater effort — that I made out in the field.
But AI isn’t any of that.
AI is, metaphorically, me handing the camera to a robot and saying, “Go get me a photo of a butterfly.”
And then it brings one back. Maybe it’s what I wanted. Maybe it isn’t. But I didn’t make any choices except to fetch a digital errand boy to go make art for me.
“Meanwhile, the invisible oligarchs who control everyone are having a field day. Everyone is falling into their traps.
The real enemy isn’t your buddy who is using AI to make a book cover; the enemy is the Powers-That-Be who thrive on dividing everyone, especially in the United States. Look at how divided everyone in the US got over politics over the past ten years, and it’s now trickled to other countries. No more, are you a fellow human? Nope, it’s who did you vote for? Well, then you must be a hateful asshole. Instant block.“
I recognize here a snippet of truth that we should be aiming our cannons at the giant companies and oligarchs who are fucking everything up and not individuals — that’s entirely fair. At the same time, that doesn’t mean going to bat for the oligarchs. Sure, there’s no ethical consumption under capitalism — but there’s also ways to not gleefully be unethical. There’s “I reluctantly have to drive to work every day, which uses fuel and harms the environment” versus, “I get my Ford F-One-Fuck-You and I roll coal and drive aggressively and vomit fumes everywhere because I don’t give a shit, you woke beta.”
Thing is, even that metaphor kinda sucks — because in most parts of this country, driving a gas vehicle is still often a grim necessity. But using AI to write or make art? Is not. It just isn’t. You can write stories and make art without it. You could eschew its use last month, last year, ten years ago, a hundred, a thousand. It’s absolutely non-essential. (I’ve never used it.)
And since she wants to bring up politics —
I mean, yeah, if you voted for the hateful asshole — and have not yet had a Come To Jesus moment about that vote and that support — and I’m gonna wonder if maybe you’re a hateful asshole, too. It’s like, if someone kicks a puppy and you clap, no, I don’t automatically assume you’re a puppy-kicker, but I sure don’t think you’re someone I’ll hire as a pet-sitter, you feel me?
“The past few weeks have been so tedious with all the gatekeepers out in full force. They are whipping people up into a frenzy, and more division is happening when it comes to AI. Of course, the irony is that the gatekeepers are denouncing AI, yet they are doing it on Facebook, which uses AI. They are likely typing their pretentious screeds on their phones, which also use AI. They likely sell their books on Amazon, which also uses AI.”
Again, a deeply strained logic here. Choosing to use AI in your work is a choice different than simply existing in a world where it is being used around you and by some of the services. And honestly, most of the people who are on Facebook or who have books on Amazon are still doing their best to never use AI. They turn it off when they are able to do so. They avoid its use. They hate when they see it.
“Oh, but Sèphera, there are different levels of AI use, and some are OKAY, but some ARE NOT.”
I mean, yeah? Isn’t that life? Everything is on some kind of spectrum, and sometimes that spectra is, in fact, in an increasing gradient of “enh” to “demonically terrible.” We’re all making choices out here however we can. AI that finds cancer or gets me to the mall faster is different than the one that stole my work and shits it back out when prompted.
“Are you watching TV? Are you using Alexa? Do you have home security? What kind of car do you drive? Do you go to the doctor? Do you watch TV? Do you go to the movies? Do you have shopping apps on your phone?”
What?
What does this even mean?
Am I participating in society, you mean? I’m not new here. Yes, we’re all doing these things all the time. This is very shallow and quite silly. “DO YOU BREATHE AIR? DO YOU USE THE TOILET? ARE YOU CLAD IN FLESH AND ACKNOWLEDGE CORPOREAL REALITY? AH! THEN YOU EXIST IN THE SAME PLANE OF EXISTENCE AS AI! HYPOCRITE!”
Like, what are we even doing here.
“Oh, Sèphera, that’s not the point. The evil is GENERATIVE AI, not all the other AI!
Sure, sure. Let’s somehow separate one form from another.
Pick and choose your evil so that you can keep gatekeeping and let the oligarchs win as the little people continue to fight against each other.”
She’s very close here to getting it, actually.
Yes, you can separate one form from another. In fact, you really should, because that’s how reality works — different things are in fact different. Worse things are worse than better things!
It’s like saying that eating food includes eating a Thanksgiving turkey and eating your neighbor, Dave. Well, they’re both eating! Oh, what! We’re going to separate one form from another now!! Way to gatekeep my cannibalism, you bully!!!
“Yes, we know AI is using up resources. So does driving a car or a plane. So does building a new home. So do a lot of things. Humans have always used up Earth’s resources and usually not nicely. There are reservations and other Indigenous communities in Canada that have never had clean water and have been ravaged by pipeline construction. But somehow that’s been okay for the past fifty years or a hundred years, and very few people scream about that. But suddenly, AI is the enemy, not everything else we’ve been doing all along.
Suddenly YOUR water might not be so clean, so now it’s a Big Deal.”
“Humans have always used resources, and indigenous people have always been fucked over, so oh well” is not neither a nice nor particularly realistic argument. “Nothing can ever be better, so make things worse” is essentially the thrust of it.
“All the drama and arguments in the horror writing field would be less prevalent if people could have conversations and educate each other. No one really and truly knows what’s going on or even what the bottom line or end goal is. But what we do know is that here at the HWA, we are all writers, we all work in publishing in some capacity, and AI is here to stay. HWA has a public stance against generative AI. But not everyone knows what that is or even how to use it.
Instead of blocking people and then telling others to block those people because those people DARED to explore AI potential for their own careers, why not be human and educate each other? Watch out for each other. Help each other. RAISE EACH OTHER UP.“
I don’t really even understand what all of this means, and honestly, re-reading her screed just makes me both annoyed and tired.
Here, I think, is the thrust of it.
Her essay behooves us writers to be “human” and to “raise each other up.”
Except, AI is not human.
It’s made of humans! It took so much of what makes us very interesting and chucked it all inside a fucking Instant Pot and let it simmer until it’s all just steamy goo. So, seeing people use it — meaning, scooping up ladlefuls of material stolen from their peers — sure doesn’t feel like them raising us up (except to their greedy lazy pig mouths), so why are we obliged to raise them up? It’s the “tolerate my intolerance” with an AI-friendly spin on it.
None of this is new from me, but I think it really behooves people to understand why some folks are so very angry at AI, at its creators, and at those quislings who dare to use it.
It’s very serious to us — a theoretically-existential threat! — to have our work taken without our permission and used to feed gluttonous software designed by techbros who literally say the quiet parts out loud when they talk about how it’ll destroy jobs, how we’re all gonna have to move to the fucking moon or instead live in a bunker beneath a data center somewhere, how if they actually had to pay creators for licensing rights they’d be bankrupt. They steal our work, they throw it into the machine like so much coal, and then use it to enrich themselves while simultaneously harming the environment and poisoning the fidelity of all our information systems. It is very clear that they want to treat information and knowledge as a resource to be mined — a utility to control, one that can be leveraged to extract payment from us. We and our work is all just material — Capital-C Content — to be melted down into slag.
So yeah! We’re kinda fucking mad about it! And when we see someone we like using it, we kinda want to kick some sand onto your shoes. You look like a sell-out. Like someone who just sold his buddy to the Cannibal Farm down the road. When someone like Hank Green is found to be using AI, it’s not that I think Hank Green — who by all reports seems like a lovely guy! — should be strung up by his heels and hit with crowbars. But it’s still disappointing. Because he’s a science communicator whose whole schtick is to answer questions and provide some measure of entertaining truth while also being someone interested in and invested in the health and wellness of our world and society — so when he’s seen using technology that sure seems to be damaging the health and wellness of our world and society, meaning it’s harming the many to benefit the few, well, yeah, you’re going to see people wanting to take him to task for that.
All this goes back to the fact that the HWA — and the SFWA, and the Author’s Guild, and so on and so forth — are professional writing organizations.
And using generative AI is not only not writing, it should not be a part of writing, and it should be viewed as antithetical to our crafts and our careers. And before you say “but what about autocorrect,” know that you and I both know what I’m talking about when I say generative AI or LLMs and it doesn’t mean using fucking spellcheck, okay? Okay.
If you wanna use AI, I can’t stop you.
But I can definitely give you a look like you just giddily shit your pants on a crowded train. That’s not me bullying you. That’s me acknowledging you shat yourself willfully and with joy and now we’re all having to deal with it.
You make your choices.
As for the HWA, I sure hope they’re going to walk this back and try to ensure something like this does not happen again, because it’s hard to stay a member of the organization if they can’t keep something so simple as their newsletter under control. Anyway. Have a great day. And fuck AI, amen.
