The Seattle Worldcon 2025 committee has cancelled the first WSFS Business Meeting Town Hall which had been scheduled for May 4. No explanation was given.
Those who had registered for the online event received notifications from Eventbrite, and the announcement was posted in social media.
The town halls are designed for members to ask questions about the business meeting process. The fate of the second town hall announced for May 25 is unknown.
The cancellation comes in the wake of the revelation that the committee used ChatGPT to vet program participants (see “Responding to Controversy, Seattle Worldcon Defends Using ChatGPT to Vet Program Participants”, “Seattle Worldcon 2025 ChatGPT Controversy Roundup”, and “Seattle 2025 Chair Apologizes for Use of ChatGPT to Vet Program Participants”.)
Discover more from File 770
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Wow. That’s something.
hmm
This is super Trumpy.
It makes sense. The committee is still coming up with the promised message that will explain what was done with ChatGPT. They can’t throw the people running the town hall to the wolves by having them do a public event where none of this is addressed.
Kate says This is super Trumpy.
No, it isn’t. Really it isn’t. There’s nothing political about this decision.
OGH: Yes that makes sense.
yes, it is a bad look but holding the meeting without substantially addressing the LLM panel vetting issue would have only made matters worse.
Yeah,when I read this, I understood why it was cancelled, and it’s entirely because they don’t want to be hounded by people who won’t wait for the PR response for what they’re doing to correct for the AI (Artificial Ineptitude) misstep with panelist vetting.
These people seem hellbent on destroying the public’s trust on WorldCon. They should not be allowed to just cancel a business meeting.
I can understand why it’s not being held at this time. But, aren’t they just opening themselves up to questions about why they cancelled rather than rescheduling? They are going to be spending a lot of time in the remaining meetings explaining the AI issue which will leave a lot less time for the things these meetings were originally intended for.
They can. It isn’t banned. Or against the bylaws.
Also it’s a “town hall”.
@ima said
This was not a business meeting. It was a town hall informational meeting primarily about how the WSFS business meeting works and how to submit business to it. It wasn’t even about the online aspects/platform of this year’s business meeting. That town hall/information session will be held on May 24, and then there are 4 ACTUAL online business meetings after that.
On the one hand, the business meeting staff who would have run this town hall probably were not directly responsible for the use of AI to select program participants, or at least that would have been someone else’s primary responsibility.
On the other hand, the business meeting staff is eventually going to have to be asked a question along the following lines:
“How is holding the business meetings online during the month before the Worldcon consistent with the following provisions of the WSFS constitution?
Section 5.1.1: ‘Business Meetings of WSFS shall be held at advertised times at each Worldcon. …’ (These meetings aren’t at the Worldcon.)
Section 5.1.5: ‘The quorum for the Business Meeting shall be twelve members of the Society physically present. …’ (Most of the participants at these meetings won’t be physically present.)
Section 6.3: ‘… This section shall not be interpreted … to allow remote participation or proxy voting at the Business Meeting.'”
Hopefully someone will bring this up to the business meeting staff at the first/next town hall, before they actually start holding a business meeting online.
Joshua K: Although those seem good questions, why are you still asking them? Isn’t it clear to you that the Seattle committee has resorted to an executive order to dictate the format they want for the meeting? They are unilaterally exercising their control power to make irrelevant any rules that interfere with taking the meeting online.
I hope they’ll have a town hall just to address their use of LLMs in the screening process.
Mike: You may well be right. But I still would like to know what the Seattle committee would say about these questions. Maybe they would claim that there is some other authority allowing them to hold the meeting online, or maybe they would rule the questions out of order and refuse to answer, or maybe something else.
I wanted to put these questions out there so other people will have reference to them in case they want to ask them instead. I would have been available to see the town hall if it had been held today, but I don’t expect to be available for the next one, so I hope someone will eventually ask these questions.