Trembling With Fear 12-10-23
Hello, children of the dark. This last week has been a bit fraught on the Horror Tree socials, so I just wanted to take this opportunity to address what’s been going on on other parts of this site.
You’ll have heard and seen Stuart talking about how super-overloaded he is right now, between MBA and job and family and running the behemoth that is Horror Tree and all his other extracurriculars. Having hit a particularly tricky patch of deadlines, he had taken a few articles from long-time and trusted contributors on trust, not giving them the usual review. Unfortunately, one of these articles turned out to espouse the virtues of using ChatGPT to edit your work, which is very much against everything we stand for—and, quite rightly, caused a Twitter furore as writers felt let down and disappointed in the site they’d trusted for more than a decade. As soon as Stuart realised what had happened, he jumped to attention, addressed the issue, took down the story, and made his views on the matter clear. But some still weren’t happy with this, so I just wanted to make it 10,000% clear:
Trembling With Fear does not condone nor accept work that has been generated by AI, including in the editing process.
This of course becomes more nuanced when you start to consider the tools we use everyday that are driven by AI—things like Grammarly, for starters. But the spirit remains true: if you ask AI to write your story, then you tidy it up and submit it under your name, you’ll be banned. If you write a story then input it to AI and ask it to edit it for you, you’ll be banned. Human endeavour is what we’re looking for here, and is what we celebrate and embrace.
And if you missed Stuart’s post addressing the issue, you’ll find it on Twitter here, and the new version of the article is here.
With that out of the way, let’s just jump straight in with this week’s dark and speculative TWF menu. Our short story offering from Laura Stone is totally twist-tastic. Then we’ve got three fabulous tasty morsels for dessert:
- Joshua Ginsberg goes meta,
- Lauren Kessinger waits in the asylum, and
- DJ Tyrer returns to the nursery..
Finally, submissions are now closed for the Christmas special. TWF special editions editor Shalini is going through the (frankly) huge amount of stories we’ve received, but you’ll likely hear from her much closer to the date of publication as to whether you’ve been successful.
Over to you, boss.
ATTENTION YOUTUBE WATCHERS: We’ve had some great responses so far but are open to more ideas – What type of content would you like to see us feature? Please reach out to [email protected]! We’ll be really working on expanding the channel late this year and early into next.
For those who are looking to connect with Horror Tree on places that aren’t Twitter, we’re also in BlueSky and Threads. *I* am also now on BlueSky and Threads.
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