The creative community is drawing a hard line in the sand. Two of science fiction and pop culture's biggest institutions—the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association (SFWA) and San Diego Comic-Con—just banned AI-generated content from their platforms after intense backlash from artists and writers. The moves signal growing resistance to generative AI in creative spaces, joining platforms like Bandcamp in what's becoming an industry-wide reckoning over the role of large language models in storytelling and art.
San Diego Comic-Con and the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association just told AI to get lost. Both organizations reversed course on generative AI policies this month after facing fierce backlash from their creative communities, marking the latest flashpoint in the escalating war between human creators and machine-generated content.
The drama at SFWA unfolded in December when the organization announced updated rules for its prestigious Nebula Awards. The initial policy stated that works written entirely by large language models wouldn't be eligible, but authors who used LLMs "at any point during the writing process" could still compete—as long as they disclosed that use to voters. The compromise seemed reasonable on paper, letting individual award voters decide whether AI assistance should disqualify a work.
But the writing community wasn't having it. As Jason Sanford reported in his Genre Grapevine newsletter, the backlash was immediate and intense. Members saw the rules as cracking open the door to AI-generated fiction, even if just partially. Within days, SFWA's Board of Directors issued an apology, admitting "our approach and wording was wrong and we apologize for the distress and distrust we caused."
The organization quickly revised the rules again, this time taking a zero-tolerance stance. The new policy states flatly that works "written, either wholly or partially, by generative large language model (LLM) tools are not eligible" for Nebula Awards. Any work using LLMs at any point in creation gets disqualified—no exceptions, no nuance.
