About a week ago, the monthly newsletter of the Horror Writers Association (HWA) raised a lot more attention than any newsletter they’d ever sent out. The reason was simple: one of their trustees had included a long and rambling essay (and I use that term lightly) wherein she defended using plagiarism engines for writing and, furthermore, accused her opponents of being gatekeepers.

Her essay pinballed through many different points, none of which were well made, and was a fascinating look into a sad mind of somebody who’s become a full-on plagiarism engine fan. Tragic, really. If she’d posted her rant on social media, it would’ve been forgotten within a day. The problem was that she was an established author with dozens of books to her name — and, more importantly, part of the HWA leadership.

If you’re not part of the writing industry, you probably have no idea what the HWA even is. In a nutshell, it’s a non-profit founded in 1985 with the mission of helping and promoting writers of horror and dark fantasy. (You can learn more over here.) It’s got some clout. It’s got some issues. Apparently, it’s also got plagiarism engine sloppers with very strong opinions…

I shall not name that trustee in this essay: I believe bullies don’t deserve to have their names remembered. If you wanted to, you could quite easily find that woman’s name — but not here. (Hey, my lair, my rules.)

I will, however, paste her unhinged rant at the end of this essay — along with the official HWA response, because things tend to digitally decay and disappear online, and I want to preserve all this for the future. The HWA, to their credit, issued a terse (and much shorter) response the day after. They removed the rogue trustee from her leadership position (though I believe she’s still an HWA member), apologized to the writer community, and vowed to screen their newsletter content better next time.

Interestingly enough, their apology went out as an email and a social media post, and is not on their site. If not for the folks reposting the full text elsewhere online, it too would disappear into the digital ether. That sort of thing is part of why I’ve started this series: someday, when the era of slop engines ends, this chronicle will be useful to those trying to make sense of our times.

The exiled HWA slopper made a lot of ridiculous assertions and bad-faith arguments in her essay, and Chuck Wendig tore them each apart much more thoroughly and passionately than I ever will. You can read his point-by-point takedown on his blog. (Especially the bit where the rogue trustee accused everyone on never having cared about the environment before all this, while somehow dragging Native Americans into her half-baked argument.)

The only thing I’ll address is her accusation that human writers (as opposed to slop gobblers) are the big, bad gatekeepers. We really aren’t. We just choose not to deal in stolen property and not to destroy the planet in the process. You know, the sort of stuff they teach you in the kindergarten. All you need to become a writer is a pencil and a piece of paper. (Hell, even cardboard will do!) Whatever device you’re using to read this can also be used to take notes and write stories and poems and more. So, so much more…

And speaking of writing: it just so happens that the rogue trustee made money off plagiarism engines. (Very surprising, I know.) Online sleuths quickly found her for-profit “writing discipline app” that would allegedly serve as your writing coach and improve your writing. I didn’t explore the app’s site far enough to see how much exactly it would cost, and I shall not link to it. Sloppers deserve neither residual income nor web traffic, no matter how minor.

I could talk on and on about the bizarre persecution complex and victim mentality of the sloppers, but I wanted to focus on something different instead. I want to talk about the entrenched AI rot within large communities — not merely the HWA, but many others, too.

In his long and excellent post on the HWA FUBAR, Michael Patrick Hicks claimed that the HWA had had plenty of changes to take a hard stance on plagiarism engines but deliberately avoided that responsibility. In his own words:

When news broke about the widescale book piracy perpetrated by Meta, Anthropic, and others, HWA authors demanded the organization take appropriate measures against these thefts and to establish appropriate anti-AI guidelines and policies. Their concerns, as I recall, were brushed aside with HWA leadership feigning a complete misunderstanding of the issues at hand and arguing that writers here in the 21st Century commonly use spellcheck in their word processing programs, which is AI, and that we were decades late in worrying about these issues. Too bad, so sad. Of course, this was then followed by a further and complete misreading of the room altogether, wherein they advertised an upcoming, and subsequently canceled, seminar they were holding in conjunction with some AI techbro or other. Naturally, I was more than happy to let my membership lapse immediately thereafter.

Those are damning words, and they echo my experience in other, non-horror writing groups. (I write primarily science fiction, with some fantasy on the side. Some of my stories are dark enough to qualify as horror, but that’s fairly rare.) I recently chose not to renew my annual membership with another, four-letter-acronym writing association that shall remain nameless, which has become more or less overrun with sloppers. One such slopper ran for a leadership position and was defeated (this time) after the association’s oddly delayed election results were finally announced. Many more sloppers preached their propaganda in the association’s Discord, where I was often the only one (or one of the very few) to stand up against them. Some of the association’s leaders later reached out to me in private, saying they agreed with me but couldn’t voice their support because they wanted to maintain peace and decorum and all that.

Are you familiar with the Nazi bar parable? A young man walks into the bar. Handsome, well groomed, polite. As soon as he sits down, the bartender grabs a baseball bat and chases him out, yelling at him to never ever return. A confused patron asks why he did that. The bartender says the guy was a Nazi, and if he was allowed in, he’d bring more of his friends, slowly but surely, until the whole place became a Nazi bar, because that’s how it starts.

So, yeah… Nazi bars and slop enthusiasts. As the old horror trope goes, the call is coming from inside the house. It can be tough to stand up against the folks you’d known for ages when they become sloppers. It’s so much easier to just look the other way and play dumb. It’s a safe option, but not for long, because the plagiarism engine supporters will just grow ever more emboldened, they will find each other, and they will try to take over.

The rogue trustee has been kicked out, but she hadn’t come out of nowhere. Like the old saying goes, if you see one cockroach, there are ten more you don’t see. How many allies and fellow sloppers did she have within the HWA ranks? Hopefully not a lot, because in her rant, she specifically called out fellow horror writers who look down on sloppers. (As they should.) And yet, there are doubtlessly others like her who are merely keeping a low profile: maybe they won’t be so dumb as to write a pro-plagiarism screed for an unvetted newsletter, but they’d be rather tough to root out.

How do you fumigate an entire association?..

Along with the four-letter-acronym association I’ve recently left, there was also a giant, closed-off community of professional writers with which I also parted ways. They had a magnificent online forum with useful archives that went back decades. They also had a fun and helpful Slack-based community where they’d trade insider tips and links and information. I spent a year there. I had a good time. Until…

Well, it was twofold, really. First, I learned that the community banned all discussions of the 2020 Isabel Fall incident. (tl;dr: a trans woman published a great and controversial short story; she had a minimal bio; the online mob latched onto her birth year (88) and accused her of being a neo-Nazi imposter; she almost committed suicide and subsequently quit writing; the leaders of that online mob have since regained their VIP status in the community.) The only reason you’d do so is if some (or many) of your own members were on the pitchfork side of that horrific incident.

The second breaking point was when a fellow member quietly informed me that a notorious slopper (from a 2025 Worldcon panel on slop which also featured Neil Clarke) was actually a valued community member, and I shouldn’t badmouth her. In the community’s forum, many of us had individual author threads where we’d post our updates, thoughts, etc. I opened that slopper’s thread… And I was floored by the extent of her slop usage: every slop bot all at once, to the point where she’d even have verbal conversations with them while driving.

But the worst part?.. The same writers whom I’d considered my friends, who had cheered me on and congratulated me on my successes, did the same for her — and with gusto. Reader, I’m not exaggerating when I say that made me sick to my stomach. That sense of betrayal… I had assumed we were all on team Human Writers, and they had certainly read my anti-slop words, and then they just played both sides and cheered and whoop-whooped for unapologetic sloppers.

That association and I parted ways very soon after that. (Partly because I blew the whistle on the 2022 Worldcon fiasco where 13 professional writers helped Google train an early version of a plagiarism engine, but that’s a different story…) Their harboring of a mega-slopper was just another example of how pointless it is to compromise. Even if you confine the sloppers to isolated parts of the community (as per their earlier compromise, they had to keep their slop in their author threads), the corruption will only grow. It will not go away.

Recently, while canvassing, I made friends with a cool young coworker. He seemed fun, right until he went on an anti-trans tirade, not realizing there was a trans person right next to him. Later, an older, chiller coworker assured me that he was a good sport and he’d grow out of his transphobia eventually. How, though?.. Something that runs that deep cannot and will not be rooted out with a couple of memes. (That naive delusion reminds me of the way Disney “cured” Loki of malignant narcissism: by kicking him in the balls all day long until he miraculously realized the error of his ways. (No, really. It was in the middle of the first season.)) Needless to say, both of those friendships hit a dead end.

You don’t coddle transphobes. You don’t compromise with plagiarism sloppers. You can’t just assume they’ll be a-okay and quietly play in their own little sandbox. No. They’re thieves, they knowingly destroy the environment, and that creates a cognitive dissonance within them. The stupidest among them are true believers who mock and lash out at human artists. The smarter ones (to an extent a slop guzzler can be called smart) flail rhetorically and try to convince us that no, we are the actual bad guys and villains.

It’s notable just how many supporters and allies of the rogue trustee stepped up to defend her in the comment sections of different news sites or social media platforms. She is not alone. Not by far.

Here is to less rot.

In conclusion, generative AI must die.

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Addendum I: the rogue trustee’s pro-slop screed

Gatekeepers are a useful tool in fiction. They provide conflict and often offer the protagonist alternative ways to figure out how to reach their goals. I think about Ghostbusters when I think about Gatekeepers unless I’m thinking about that cool roller coaster at the Cedar Point gates.

In real life, though, gatekeepers are often self-proclaimed people who have decided that the rest of the world must follow their own moral code that they’ve developed from their own personal life experiences and interpretation of social and political events around them.

Oh, how I tire of the horror writer community and the gatekeeping that goes on. Perhaps things were better before we all got online, when we didn’t really know each other and our personal beliefs or our lives or our habits. We knew nothing of each other, and maybe that was a good way to be.

As someone who grew up typing novels on a manual typewriter, I’ve seen a lot of changes in the world. I was super resistant to personal computers; I thought we’d all get radiation poisoning and die, so I didn’t have a computer until 1987 when my husband bought me one to help me with my writing. I was very late getting a cell phone; I didn’t get one until 2008, because I don’t answer the phone anyway; why would I carry it around with me?

But like most of you, I’m now addicted to having a computer in my pocket, and I love being able to correct my writing with spell check and move around entire paragraphs without having to retype pages perfectly with permanent liquid paper stains on my fingers.

Technology keeps changing, oh-so-rapidly these days. We went from screaming about having to pump our own gas to screaming about self-checkouts. Back in the day, film studios were upset at the invention of home television sets, musicians were upset about electric guitars and synthesizers, filmmakers were upset about YouTube, visual artists were upset about photography, photographers were upset about Photoshop, and now writers are screaming about AI.

When YouTube was first invented, I read tarot cards on it daily, weekly, and nearly got shut down twice because a) I was showing cards and cards are copyright-protected (even the backs of the cards) and b) another time they saw a Luke Skywalker figure on my shelf in the background, and I was nearly shut down again for copyright. And yet, look at YouTube now. People read tarot cards all over the place; they show off their Star Wars toys, and they “react” to other people’s videos or to movies. The game completely changed along the way, as did copyright and a bunch of other stuff. No one cares anymore.

Meanwhile, the invisible oligarchs who control everyone are having a field day. Everyone is falling into their traps.

The real enemy isn’t your buddy who is using AI to make a book cover; the enemy is the Powers-That-Be who thrive on dividing everyone, especially in the United States. Look at how divided everyone in the US got over politics over the past ten years, and it’s now trickled to other countries. No more, are you a fellow human? Nope, it’s who did you vote for? Well, then you must be a hateful asshole. Instant block.

But who’s the asshole?

Every week, the gatekeepers of horror writers have some new witch hunt. Sometimes it’s a good thing to suss out shitty publishers, editors, and agents. Yet, not ALL shitty ones are sussed out because, you know, there are consequences to getting all the shitty people shut down. Some people still like the opportunities to get published or represented even if it means going with the most despicable people because the gatekeepers didn’t get them shut down, or sometimes, don’t even notice. It all depends on who is buttering the toast.

Don’t think I haven’t noticed.

I like the gatekeepers who block me because I’m “friends” with “so and so” and I didn’t see the “threat” that I Will Be Blocked if I Don’t Unfriend So and So Right Now!

Puhleeze.

Are we still in grade school?

Do people really do as they’re told because they saw it on Facebook?

I have never blocked someone because someone else told me to. Ridiculous.

The past few weeks have been so tedious with all the gatekeepers out in full force. They are whipping people up into a frenzy, and more division is happening when it comes to AI. Of course, the irony is that the gatekeepers are denouncing AI, yet they are doing it on Facebook, which uses AI. They are likely typing their pretentious screeds on their phones, which also use AI. They likely sell their books on Amazon, which also uses AI.

Oh, but Sèphera, there are different levels of AI use, and some are OKAY, but some ARE NOT.

Are they though? Are some okay and some are not? Your argument seems weirdly skewed. Again, manipulating reality to suit whatever platform you want to preach from.

Yes, I’ve watched the self-proclaimed gatekeepers explain their version of the differences when it suits their blocking rampages. Good for them.

Are you watching TV? Are you using Alexa? Do you have home security? What kind of car do you drive? Do you go to the doctor? Do you watch TV? Do you go to the movies? Do you have shopping apps on your phone?

Are you truly not using AI at all in your life, and have you truly boycotted all companies that use AI?

No, of course not. You don’t even know where AI lurks. It’s everywhere right now.

It’s okay to use it for medical diagnosis but not for diagnosing if your book has a good synopsis?

Oh, Sèphera, that’s not the point. The evil is GENERATIVE AI, not all the other AI!

Sure, sure. Let’s somehow separate one form from another.

Pick and choose your evil so that you can keep gatekeeping and let the oligarchs win as the little people continue to fight against each other.

Show your zero tolerance for how other people live their lives by blocking them or cutting them out of your life because they played with an AI picture or made a little AI movie or dabbled with a bit of AI to see what happens if they used it in their writing.

AI is here. It’s been coming since I was typing on a manual typewriter. You can let the robots win by becoming less human by cutting out all your friends, fans, family, and readers because they dared to try out AI, or you can be a human being and let people explore and figure things out for themselves.

Hollywood is already embracing AI.

Many companies use AI.

AI can be useful for tedious tasks such as creating listings on eBay or Poshmark. Do you shop or sell on those platforms? They totally use AI now, so you’d better boycott them too.

I went to the AI panel at Stokercon, and of course, most of the panelists were vehemently anti-AI. An audience member stood up and pointed out that they learned about the panel because they saw it on Sched, which is the app that the HWA/Stokercon uses, and THAT is AI. Doesn’t HWA have an anti-AI stance? Oh, but of course, THAT is okay; it’s all the other AI stuff that isn’t.

Sure. Sure.

Yes, we know AI is using up resources. So does driving a car or a plane. So does building a new home. So do a lot of things. Humans have always used up Earth’s resources and usually not nicely. There are reservations and other Indigenous communities in Canada that have never had clean water and have been ravaged by pipeline construction. But somehow that’s been okay for the past fifty years or a hundred years, and very few people scream about that. But suddenly, AI is the enemy, not everything else we’ve been doing all along.

Suddenly YOUR water might not be so clean, so now it’s a Big Deal.

You can all keep screaming and blocking people who dare to use AI. Go ahead. I’m tired of “I can’t believe so and so DARED to use AI to create their cover/write synopsis/make an avatar, so they need to be BLOCKED RIGHT NOW!”

“I can’t believe so-and-so who is a leading author in our field, and I’ve read and loved all their books, but they DARED to use AI so now I can’t read anything else they’ll ever write ever again, and they must be BLOCKED!”

Knock yourself out.

In the meantime, you could be posting happy, fun, proactive things instead of lecturing and whining that everyone has to do things YOUR way and see the world YOUR way and live life YOUR way.

It’s a Wild West right now with regard to AI. I remember when people were screaming about self-publishing. Yet, here it is. People were cranking out a book a week, a day, before the latest AI developments. Some people make a fortune, some don’t. Some people write their own books, some don’t. People with a lot of money can buy more advertising and can sell more books regardless of whether they’re well written. It’s been that way forever.

The reading public will buy what they will buy. Screaming about what’s right, wrong, ethical, unethical, and pitting your fellow writers against each other isn’t helpful.

You do you, but in the meantime, like with everything else that’s been invented in my lifetime, I’ll watch what’s going on and see how it fits into my life. No one screaming on Facebook is going to sway my opinion one way or another, except to help me see you as a closed-minded gatekeeper, and I probably won’t buy your books.

Everyone on earth is affected by the new advances in AI. It’s in every industry everywhere. You can’t pick and choose anymore. It’s in science, it’s in the arts, it’s in technology, it’s spreading faster than Audrey 2. It’s growing faster than our human minds can keep up with it. It is part of our lives in so many ways that we may or may not realize.

All the drama and arguments in the horror writing field would be less prevalent if people could have conversations and educate each other. No one really and truly knows what’s going on or even what the bottom line or end goal is. But what we do know is that here at the HWA, we are all writers, we all work in publishing in some capacity, and AI is here to stay. HWA has a public stance against generative AI. But not everyone knows what that is or even how to use it.

Instead of blocking people and then telling others to block those people because those people DARED to explore AI potential for their own careers, why not be human and educate each other? Watch out for each other. Help each other. RAISE EACH OTHER UP.

We’re a writers’ organization, and we should be exploring ways to be more cohesive, not more divisive.

If you are confused about AI, ask for help.

If you aren’t sure if you are even using AI, you should be able to ask for help without a huge witch hunt shutting you down.

You should be allowed to experiment with this new technology without fear of your fellow writers accusing you of terrible things whether you’re tinkering with your avatar or creating a book trailer.

As writers, editors, and educators, we should be more tolerant of one another rather than trying to shut each other down.

The witch hunts are exhausting and quite embarrassing, really, not the best look for professional authors.

You can choose to be a gatekeeper, or you can choose to have some humanity for your fellow human beings who are just trying to figure things out.

No one has the answers yet, so why do you think you do?

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Addendum II: HWA’s official response

The Executive Leadership and Trustees on the Board of the Horror Writers Association has voted to remove Sephera Giron from her position as Trustee effective immediately.

The Horror Writers Association is committed to the promotion of Horror and Dark Fantasy literature and the broadening of intellectual and cultural horizons by way of good works in these genres. In support of this mission, the Board established a robust artificial intelligence policy, following input from all levels of membership. This policy emphasizes the organization’s sincere commitment to not only uplifting creators but also protecting a culture of labor compensation in the arts, aligning with principles that safeguard our community.

To this end, the HWA Board firmly and resoundingly rejects the opinion piece of Trustee Sephera Giron as included in the August 2026 installment of the HWA Member Newsletter in the “In the Trenches” column. This piece does not meet the standards of care and support to which we hold ourselves as elected members of this writer’s organization. We regret that it was published in our newsletter without proper vetting. The HWA will review all newsletter submission procedures, including those submitted by Trustees.

Further, we reject the assertions in the piece, particularly those calling authors with genuine and sincere concerns regarding the proliferation of genAI (more commonly referred to as simply AI) Luddites and/or gatekeepers. Additionally, in keeping with the organization’s ongoing commitment to the uplift and promotion of diverse voices in Horror literature, we firmly denounce the comparison of concerns over AI data center proliferation to the ongoing struggles over Indigenous water rights and ways. As the leadership of the Horror Writers Association, we sincerely apologize for the hurt that these words have caused.

We have heard your concerns and write today with a full understanding of the severity of the error made by way of this opinion piece’s publication. It is not in keeping with opinion of the HWA, the Board, and the general consensus of membership. In the future, we will do more to better to review and vet material included in the newsletter so that a repeat of this incident does not occur.

Given that the column in question fails to uphold the principles of the organization, does not reflect the consensus of leadership and membership alike on the subject, and demonstrates a failure to fulfill the responsibilities of a Trustee, the Board has voted to remove Giron from her position effective immediately.

We have always been an organization meant to protect writers and that is what we will continue to stand for.

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(This is part two of my ongoing series “Dispatches from the War on AI.” The first installment can be found here: Dispatches from the War on AI: the Fall of the “Myths & Legends” imprint )