Updates from the Board on AI

How Your Survey Feedback Is Supporting 2026 Processes

Living in Portland, Oregon, I see daily the urgency of activism and the need for good policies built by community support. We live in a wildly dangerous time. It’s hard to write in the face of so much uncertainty. But what I’ve learned over the past year is that we all move together.
 
I used to think it was “rise together,” but sometimes we fall together, too. 

Thank you for all your support over the past few months as we’ve been rising back up. 
Our community can help ground us and speculative fiction can give us a pathway toward healing. I’ve been thinking of this lately as I’ve been reading the work of our Grand Master N. K. Jemisin. In The Killing Moon, she said:

“True peace required the presence of justice, not just the absence of conflict.”

What can peace and justice look like in our community? How can we support and care for each other and also fight for our livelihoods and our lives?

For me, our community has to guide our decision-making, our policies, and our future. Generative AI is one such area of concern for all of us, where we are stronger when we work in community. Together, we are fighting for the right to create and to imagine while at the same time, our work is being stolen, plagiarized, and degraded.

We have work to do.

In December, SFWA sent out a call to our community and received over 1,900 surveys on LLM usage. Your feedback and suggestions are helping to guide our discussions.

Since we made clear that using LLMs in the production of a work would disqualify that work for a Nebula, many of you have asked us for guidance and support as you consider your Nebula nominations. 

Last year, our challenge was figuring out how to empower and educate voting members who needed help identifying how different types of LLM are showing up in our industry production processes. That work continues.
 
In January, the Emerging Tech Committee met with a more robust mandate. They are now actively engaging with and supporting our work of member and community education. Their work on definitions, resource libraries, and keeping the human centered in our creative practice will be implemented in the coming months. We are thankful for this highly engaged group of volunteers, who embody the human in this process so well.

In January, the Board’s AI Working Group also met several times. This team includes SFWA staff, the SFWA Awards Rules Committee (SARC), and the Nebula Awards Commissioner (NAC). We benefited from your survey data as we discussed formal SFWA policy in light of what the community needs. It’s a scary and overwhelming time to be a writer. Further guidance is forthcoming next week.

What we’ve learned, and what we continue to learn, is that we are doing this together.

This struggle is one drop in an ocean of pain and conflict right now, but together, we can fight to protect our creative lives, our genre, and our community.

We will keep working toward the worlds we want to read and live in. Thank you for celebrating, honoring, and fighting for creators and their work with us.

Kate Ristau
SFWA Board President