Worldcon Is Getting Eviscerated for Using AI to Select Panelists

In a world where even our refrigerators have been imbued with AI, it seems nothing good is safe from the perfidious and error-prone tech. Not even the beloved World Science Fiction Convention, often known affectionately as Worldcon, is immune to the AI takeover. Worldcon is the longest running sci-fi gathering on the planet, starting in 1939 and doling out the influential Hugo Awards to literary heavyweights ranging from Kurt Vonnegut to Ursula K. Le Guin. But now the gathering has hit a huge snafu that sounds, frankly, like the plot of a Hugo-winning tale: in a statement about the planning for Seattle Worldcon 2025 later this summer, convention organizers admitted they turned to a large language model (LLM) to select which panelists to program. "We received more than 1,300 panelist applicants for Seattle Worldcon 2025," the statement read. "Building on the work of previous Worldcons, we chose to vet program participants before inviting them to be on our program." For context, prev ... Read full article.