Science Fiction Writers of America Survey 2026-01-04

The SFWA have put up a survey asking everyone, writers and readers of Science and Speculative Fiction for their views on Large Language Models usage by writers. Along with the multiple choice questions it has two spots for longer form replies. Here is what I put in them:

Which of the following most closely resembles your position on the use of Large Language Models (LLMs) in the writing process?
(Required)

There is no ethical use-case for writers, because this technology was developed through piracy and/or continues to negatively impact environmental systems and marginalized human beings.

The use of LLMs as writing props has been shown to actively undermine writing skills, research skills and the primary point of writing anything in the first place - to communicate your thoughts to others that you cannot reach with speech.

Ted Chiang's metaphor of

using a forklift to hit your weightlifting goals

As the linguist Emily M. Bender has noted, teachers don’t ask students to write essays because the world needs more student essays. The point of writing essays is to strengthen students’ critical-thinking skills; in the same way that lifting weights is useful no matter what sport an athlete plays, writing essays develops skills necessary for whatever job a college student will eventually get. Using ChatGPT to complete assignments is like bringing a forklift into the weight room; you will never improve your cognitive fitness that way.

is partly apposite, but it gives the LLMs too much credit for writing ability.

My essay from 2010 If Google predicts your future, will it be a cliché? cited Micheal Frayn's 1965 The Tin Men as a warning against collating statistically plausible phrases with choice points as a substitute for journalism, and George Orwell's 1944 essay Politics and the English Language warning against:

gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug. The attraction of this way of writing is that it is easy. It is easier—even quicker, once you have the habit—to say “In my opinion it is not an unjustifiable assumption that” than to say “I think”. If you use ready-made phrases, you not only don't have to hunt about for the words; you also don't have to bother with the rhythms of your sentences since these phrases are generally so arranged as to be more or less euphonious.

Automating clumsy clichéd writing isn't progress.

[Continued] What forms of guidance do you think would most benefit writers trying to navigate the growing presence of LLMs in our industry?

Please read Robert Kingett's The Colonization of Confidence, which expresses this dreadful trap in the form of a story of how to overcome it.

Run, do not walk, away from this attack on your own mind and the pressure to replace it with a statistical average of other peoples' previous writings, bowdlerised by the most illiterate executive class we have ever seen, buoyed up by an epistemic closure as bad as we have seen in the 20th century.

The obscenity of the co-option of works that used automata as metaphors for human slavery being used to justify this systematic assault on every way we have worked to preserve previous human knowledge and writing in favour of a statistical mush of digitised texts should be opposed by all who believe in writing as human communication, with the living and the dead, as the SFWA have historically done.