SFWA AI Statement

The Board of Directors of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association (SFWA) has released a statement on the use of AI and Large Language Models (LLMs) to produce text. The Board

has been monitoring the rapidly evolving technological and legal landscape as it pertains to machine-generated works. We continue to hold conversations inside our organization, as evidenced by our recent call for posts that brought in a wide variety of important perspectives. Additionally, the Board has simultaneously reached outward to other organizations made up of publishing creators, with a focus on fiction writers.

The Board recognizes there is much to learn, and is cautious to offer advice or warnings in this area for two reasons: one, the rate of adaptation and technological evolution is accelerating at unprecedented speeds; and two, foundational legal principles pertaining to copyright and fair use have yet to be definitively established.

Despite this, SFWA feels that there are relevant time-honored principles that can help guide our community through understanding and reacting to the evolving technological and legal landscape. This statement should not be construed as legal advice, not least because our community of creators spans many countries, but rather as guidelines to help creators around the globe.

Their four principles are:

1. Creators must be compensated for the use of their work.

2. Creators’ contributions to a work must be credited.

3. Creators’ privacy must be protected, especially for unpublished work.

4. Writing and publishing genre fiction is a business with important norms.

See the full statement for detailed discussions of each point.

The Board says, “In light of the concerns discussed in this statement and elsewhere, SFWA’s Board of Directors has instructed its staff and volunteers to avoid seeking out and intentionally using generative AI/ML tools for any internal or publicly published material for SFWA, except for the purpose of discussing these technologies as part of our educational mission.”

They conclude, “Please take this statement not as our final word on the subject but as part of a vital conversation. Speculative fiction and the world shape each other. The more society needs fiction to understand the world, the more critical it becomes to support the writers who create it.”

The recent public availability of AI/LLM programs like Chat GPT have allowed people to create vast quantities of machine-generated text based on their prompts, with some negative consequences. Neil Clarke, editor of Clarkesworld, has suffered a flood of AI-generated fiction submissions all year, and wrote about the problem in a recent editorial:

In February, we attracted a considerable amount of media attention over the impact of ChatGPT and other Large Language Models (LLMs) on our submissions process. In short, for the first time in over a decade we closed story submissions for something other than a server or software update. What happened? We were receiving a large number of submissions generated by ChatGPT. We received fifty of them the morning we closed and over five hundred in under twenty days that month.

SFWA and other writers organizations are watching these developments. The Authors Guild now recommends a clause in publishing contracts “to prohibit the use of an author’s work for training artificial intelligence technologies without the author’s express permission.” Meanwhile, AI-generated books are already flooding the Amazon Kindle store. The US Copyright Office has declared that AI-generated material is not eligible for copyright, though “the human-authored aspects” of works created with the help of AI are eligible. The field is in flux and doesn’t look likely to settle anytime soon.

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