This is still not my circus…
But I’ve been watching this year’s Worldcon drama unfold. Seattle used ChatGPT to vet program participants, based on three widely excoriated updates/apologies. Three folks on the WSFS/Hugo side of the convention (i.e. not the division that used ChatGPT) resigned. A number of program participants withdrew; so did a Lodestar nominee. Given the nature of convention drama, I expect we haven’t heard the end of Seattle shenanigans.
I think it’s interesting that Seattle seems shocked by the backlash it’s struggling to handle.1 There has been a lot of discussion about so-called AI within the writing community over the past couple years; it started even sooner among artists. While some of this discussion happens behind closed doors (e.g. members-only online spaces), it’s also been news in the genre and non-genre press. This is, in short, a big issue for many of the convention’s prospective participants and members.
This is not the only instance of a disconnect between convention runners and a segment of fandom (broadly defined). Codes of conduct may help, but there’s a long history of conventions being unwelcoming or dangerous; problems including sexual harassment and racist exclusion persist. The main difference with this particular misstep is that Seattle acted against the interests of a subset of fandom that the convention cannot easily afford to abandon. While conrunners may not feel the lack of potential Black members who never register (a far more fundamental and troubling issue, IMHO, than Seattle’s ChatGPT use), they will feel the lack of industry professionals. Marketing a convention involves participant names. Convention programming relies upon the donated time and effort of panelists and moderators. Seattle has unwittingly illustrated the need for conventions to decide who they are for, and to understand the priorities of those constituencies.
- While I don’t think Seattle has handled this well at all, I do appreciate that they have not thrown individual volunteers under the bus. This is an institutional failure and Seattle Worldcon 2025 absolutely deserves to be ratioed. Maybe there should be additional resignations and a more complete report for transparency purposes, but nothing would be served by adding volunteer names to this week’s firestorm. ↩︎
