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AI DESTROYS THE HUGOS!!!
Okay, that's totally a clickbait title and not really accurate. But hey, it's not as high stakes as a potential nuclear conflict between India and Pakistan, or Trump's tariffs, or even whether or not polyamory is ruining society, but it's my beat: nerdy sci-fi bullshit.
It's a year beginning with a 2, which means there is drama over this year's WorldCon.
What is WorldCon?
We're all nerds here, but I know not all of us are SFF nerds, so for @2rafa and the handful of others who'd never lower themselves to reading shit with elves, WorldCon is the annual science fiction convention, held in a different city every year, that awards the Hugos, at one time considered the most prestigious award in science fiction. The drama and controversies over past WorldCons and Hugo Awards have been enumerated here often; at this point, as my lede says, it's practically an annual tradition. I don't collect links but maybe if you ask @gattsuru nicely he'll post some of the past dirt.
Usually these controversies are something Culture War-related. The Hugos are widely perceived to have gone fully Woke, and I must admit that I am one of those heavy SF readers who not only no longer cares much about the Hugos, whereas at one time I would have at least checked out the latest Hugo winner, I now consider them to be almost an anti-recommendation.
Just to give you an idea of the state of the Hugos: it's been ten years since a man won the Hugo for best novel (Cixin Liu and his translator Ken Liu (no relation) for The Three-Body Problem in 2015), and most years since then have seen between 0 and 2 men even nominated. This year actually features three men on the ballot (including Adrian Tchaikovsky nominated twice)! I'm rooting for Tchaikovsky since I actually read his books but, well, John Scalzi is the last white guy to get a Hugo, in 2013 (for one of his worst novels, Redshirts).
So anyway, technically this year's drama is not (so far) about the Hugos themselves, but about WorldCon (which this year is being held in Seattle).
What did they do this time?
Short version: They used ChatGPT to vet WorlCon panelists. Several WorldCon committee members resigned in protest, and the list of authors and other program participants doing likewise is growing.
https://file770.com/seattle-worldcon-2025-hugo-administrators-and-wsfs-division-head-resign/
https://www.patreon.com/posts/128296070
https://slashdot.org/story/25/05/06/0139251/hugo-administrators-resign-in-wake-of-chatgpt-controversy
https://gizmodo.com/worldcon-2025-chatgpt-controversy-hugos-2000598351
Longer version: Reportedly there were as many as 1300 people applying to participate in various WorldCon programs this year: this would be book signings, readings, panels, workshops, etc. Obviously not everyone who wants to be on a panel can be, and WorldCon has to be selective about who it invites. The vetting is done by volunteers, and researching 1300 people must be pretty time consuming; apparently they had the bright idea of using ChatGPT do a search and summary of all prospective participants as a "first pass."
I assume they mostly want to weed out obvious crazies and literal Nazis and pedos, but given that WorldCon skews very woke nowadays, the vetting almost certainly includes looking for any "problematic" public statements or other transgressions in someone's background that might lead to a Cancellation or Drama.
Honestly, using an LLM to summarize and categorize your list of randos seems like a pretty good use of AI to me. Supposedly all final decisions were made by humans, but nonetheless, the concom is imploding.
If you're unaware, most artists and authors hate AI. This has also been covered extensively in past CW threads, but the stated reason for the disdain towards AI is that authors' and artists' work was "stolen" to train LLMs without compensation, but there is also a very real fear of being replaced.
This generalized antipathy has basically been extended to any use of AI at all, so even though the WorldCon committee is insisting there has been no use of generative AI, no final decisions made by AI, and that AI has nothing to do with any Hugo nominations or decisions, people are still Very Very Angry that it was used at all.
If you read the commentary, it's not just general AI-hate (though there is plenty of that), but also concern that the LLMs might have made Problematic Decisions. Obviously, people are bringing up hallucinations (what if ChatGPT made up a racist Twitter post?) and the possibility of false negatives, but, there is also concern about false positives. What if ChatGPT missed something Problematic? Again, supposedly humans were supposed to make the final decisions, but cynically, I think they're worried that ChatGPT might approve too many cishetwhitemales. Also much outrage at "Entering private data into an AI without permission" (i.e., typing someone's name into ChatGPT and asking it to do an Internet search).
This isn't as juicy as past WorldCon/Hugo dramas, but it's very Current Year. I cannot help finding it ironic that we're now at a place where science fiction fans are demanding that we ban AI tools.
This is a fascinating tempest in a teapot.
My senior capstone in undergrad was making a scheduling application for a big yearly conference that the school held each year. They told me that it took a group of people about two weeks to work out a schedule by hand. They gave my group a list of constraints and the panelist data, and we made something that could make a schedule in a few seconds, which I believe is still in use to this day.
While LLMs are different from a bespoke application, I think that anything that makes the lives of con organizers easier is a good thing, and it saddens me that the new generative AI luddites are rejecting useful tools based off of vibes and almost superstitious taboos. That said, I do understand the concerns about false positives and negatives, and think that some sort of appeals process, or perhaps even a way to request the AI's output would be a nice courtesy to provide to applicants.
I don’t think it’s a superstitious taboo, I think it’s a case of ‘If we can kill this now by making it socially unacceptable to use, it’ll never compete with us.’ Alongside a healthy dose of blind, seething hatred - I saw a lot of fedposting from artist acquaintances last year.
For me personally, I intensely dislike AI content and the reasons are the following:
If someone tells me they used an AI tool to do their job more efficiently, I immediately assume that any of the following are the case:
For the Hugo awards panelist pre-selection, I assume that all three are true.
I think what you're missing about AI is that the investment of time and money is so incredibly low for what it offers. I pay 20 bucks a month for the paid chatGPT and it's among the very best best time:money investments I've ever made, and it's not even mandatory (you can do fine hooking up a chat app out there to an API key and paying cents after a $5 initial up-front investment, or bounce between free versions, or buy a subscription to a model aggregator for $7 bucks a month that is making an arbitrage on the API cost vs your subscription and your actual predicted usage).
Fundamentally, what might take a human a significant time investment is just gone completely with an LLM. You will never annoy it with stupid questions. You can ask and rephrase the same question multiple times without sounding stupid. You can send it off to do research on something you are mildly curious about but too lazy to synthesize yourself. You can converse with it in a foreign language to practice. You can quickly sanity check a potential action without judgement, and without waiting for a friend to text you back. You can have it reformat text or perform an annoying repetitive text-based task. You can have it write test questions for you to practice on. You can have it pretend to be the other side of a job interview and give you feedback on your answers. You can have it add some comments to your code. You can have it write a skeleton for a program. You can have it quickly give you a summary of a PDF you feed it, unique to your problem. I could go on. It's truly a fundamental change, and potentially very useful in the workplace as it is in life.
Yes, there are pitfalls and dangers in all of those, but in terms of risk-reward? You are risking almost nothing but a tiny bit of your own time, and getting back something potentially very valuable. The "task annoyance" that you wouldn't even inflict on an intern is suddenly a non-issue. I find many (though far from all) of the issues people encounter with AI stem from either misunderstanding what AI can actually DO and what it's best at, or being bad at imagination in terms of your prompts. Very few of the things I listed above might need extensive checking to the extent that you might as well have done it yourself. Many of them are things for which there is no adequate replacement IRL, or at least, not at remotely the same price point or time commitment.
People go through tons of effort to set up language-learning pen-pals, as an example. You can have AI do that now. You can even tell it what language level you're on, or what country to pretend to be from, or tell it to introduce new concepts to you slowly. And worst case, even if the AI makes a few grammar mistakes, so do real people. There's very little downside!
I will admit that the Hugo use-case seems honestly a bit ill-suited for what they used it for. AI isn't that great at free-wheeling internet navigation, so using it for vetting seems like a bad idea. Now, if you instructed it to go through self-submissions or resumes? With a testing and verification step to set up the right detailed prompt, that could be very effective as a screening tool.
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There's definitely no "general" AI these days that doesn't need careful double-checking.
But this doesn't follow. I don't use AI for my job yet, but at least for independent research it often makes a much better search engine than a search engine. The results are full of as much nonsense as reality, but that's often true of search engine results too. Weeding out the nonsense is generally much faster than fighting to find exactly the right search terms, especially when the problem is related to a field of math where the search terms include words like "normal" that have been overloaded ten different ways.
It's kind of like having an intern, but instead of handing them a tedious task and expecting to have to double-check the results with a fine-toothed comb a day later, you get the results and have to get out of the comb a moment later. With an intern there's an investment aspect (they're learning fast from us and that'll make some of them better permanent hires in the future) that conversing with an AI lacks, but despite that AI is currently improving faster than a typical intern learns IMHO. Over the last year or two the top commercial LLM performance on my favorite "benchmark" grad-school-level applied math question has gone from "making basic sign errors on the easiest part of their answer and then arguing about them or making other errors when they're pointed out" to "missing a subtle inconsistency in the hardest part of their answer and then correcting it when it's pointed out".
Indeed, one of the fundamental conjectures in CS, "P != NP", can be somewhat rephrased as "it's easier to check an answer than to produce it". I think it's actually something of an optimistic view of the future that most things will end up produced with generative AI, but humans will still have a useful role in checking its work.
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