In this episode of Self-Publishing News, Dan Holloway examines the Nebula Awards’ abrupt reversal on AI eligibility rules, moving from disclosure to a blanket ban and sparking debate across the science fiction and fantasy community. He also looks at growing concerns over Amazon’s “Ask This Book” feature, including a rare public response from Amazon and renewed questions about licensing, derivative use, and author consent in AI-powered reading tools.
Listen to the Podcast: Nebula Awards Reverse AI Policy
Show Notes
SFWA Launches, Aborts LLM Tools Nebula Rule Change on Same Day
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About the Host
Dan Holloway is a novelist, poet, and spoken word artist. He is the MC of the performance arts show The New Libertines, He competed at the National Poetry Slam final at the Royal Albert Hall. His latest collection, The Transparency of Sutures, is available on Kindle.
Read the Transcript
Dan Holloway: Hello, welcome to Self-Publishing News. This is the first episode I've recorded this year, so I'll take the opportunity to wish you a Happy New Year. I hope 2026 is treating you well and will continue to do so — better than 2025.
We start with the Nebula Awards. The Nebulas are run by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association and are one of the major awards for fantasy and science fiction. They're a particularly important set of awards for us because they are actively indie-friendly — all you need to do to be eligible is to be a member of the SFWA.
So what are they getting into trouble about? It's rules around AI and eligibility. This is something that is going to cause increasing problems for anyone who runs awards or any organization that has eligibility terms: how do you police AI-generated content and the use of AI in general? How do you draw the line — which is increasingly being drawn — between assistive AI on the one hand, such as spell-checking tools, and generative AI on the other?
The controversy arose because the SFWA came out with a set of rules in December that would have allowed AI-generated content provided it was fully disclosed. The original rules said: yes, you can use AI provided you disclose that you do so. If you go to the File 770 website, there is a really interesting set of comparisons between the rules that were proposed and what then happened when there was massive pushback on the same day — and I'll put the link in for Howard to include.
The rules were rescinded in favor of a blanket ban on AI. Some of the changes seem relatively uncontroversial. For example, the original rule stated that works ‘wholly written using generative large language model tools' are not eligible. You can see why that would have caused outrage, because the key word there is ‘wholly.' The new text simply says works ‘written either wholly or partially' by generative LLM tools are not eligible. So it went from ‘you can use it some of the time' to a complete blanket ban.
The most controversial change, however, involves disclosure. The original rule said works that used LLMs at any point during the writing process must disclose this upon acceptance of nomination, and the nature of the technology's use would be made clear to voters in the final ballot. The point being that you might have used it to do research, to do spell-checking, or to generate text — but it would be up to voters, who are SFWA members, to decide how they wanted to treat that knowledge. The new text is simply: works that used LLMs at any point during the writing process must disclose this upon acceptance of nomination, and those works will be disqualified.
It is now a blanket ban, and that blanket ban has now caused another round of pushback — this time in the opposite direction. This is very well articulated in a letter from Erin Underwood, which I wholly recommend you read in full. It's a very long and very detailed letter. The long and the short of it comes down to two points. First: how on earth do you police this? Second: there is no nuance here, and nuance is what is needed in a changing landscape like this.
In particular, there are lots of different ways that generative LLMs can be used. As Underwood points out, you cannot simply draw a clean distinction between spell-check tools on the one hand and generative AI that can write your essay for you on the other, because some assistive tools are powered by generative AI and large language models. And in particular, there is the question of research. If you use a search bar to find information for your novel, it is very likely that what is returned will have been produced with the involvement of a large language model. How do we actually live with the complex reality we're now in?
This is something that will inevitably come up again and again. The science fiction and fantasy community is always at the forefront of these discussions, so this feels like a case where they're doing a lot of the heavy lifting on behalf of the rest of us. I do recommend going to read the sources I'll link to.
Kindle's Ask This Book Feature and the Authors Guild Response
The other big news is also AI-related, carrying on from something I mentioned previously: Kindle's Ask This Book feature. This is the feature that uses AI to allow people to highlight text in a Kindle and ask questions about it — things like ‘tell me more about what this character has done so far' or ‘based on what's happened previously, what can you tell me about what they're doing now?'
This feature has now produced some quite serious feedback, articulated by the Authors Guild in the US. They've highlighted various issues, and interestingly they have received a response from Amazon — something I haven't seen elsewhere. Amazon's response makes a couple of points it thinks justify what it's doing. First, anything produced or used by the feature isn't used for general training. Second, Kindle already allows readers to search — this is just an expansion of that existing capability, and therefore they don't need a license to do it. And third, the ‘immersive' argument: readers have been clicking away to look things up on Google for years; this just lets them do it within the context of the book.
The Authors Guild doesn't take kindly to these arguments. They use the phrase ‘possibly creating a derivative use.' The argument is that this is not simply an expansion of search — what is produced may actually be a work in and of itself, a work produced based on the original book. And if that's the case, it's more than a search function, and you might well need a license for it. That is the key point: licensing rights are going to be central in this new landscape, and authors need to be able to negotiate those rights rather than having them simply taken for granted or deemed unnecessary.
So there we go — two big controversies to start the year. There will be many more as the year progresses, and I'll be here to tell you about them and provide links to primary sources rather than AI summaries. Thank you very much, and I look forward to speaking to you again at the same time next week.
