Ryan Williamson AI and Writing, Commentary

An AI Ethics Framework So Boring It Might Actually Work

SFWA needed two emergency board votes to create terms they couldn’t define and rules they can’t enforce to produce an AI policy that doesn’t address a single actual threat or valid ethical concern. That’s what happens when a professional organization builds ethics by panic instead of framework. This essay constructs the framework SFWA didn’t—starting with the three objections that arrive before any conversation about AI tools can happen, dismantling each on technical and ethical grounds, then applying four consistent principles to the questions that actually matter. AI cover art passes every test. AI manuscript screening fails all of them. Meanwhile the community’s entire ethics apparatus is aimed squarely at struggling indie authors trying to get their book in front of readers.

Ryan Williamson Religion

A Prophet, Priest, and King After the Order of Melchizedek

The most sacred titles in Mormonism—Prophet, Priest, and King—are conferred in a temple ceremony accessible only after worthiness interviews, a full tithe, and a current recommend. In Catholicism, they’re spoken over every infant at baptism. The Melchizedek Priesthood, the LDS Church’s highest authority, is built on linear succession and a traceable chain of hands—which is almost exactly backwards from what Hebrews 7 is actually arguing. And the temple endowment, stripped to its structure, turns out to be Catholic baptism and confirmation filtered through degraded Masonic ritual. This companion to “It’s Just Tuesday for Catholics” asks why Joseph Smith built an elaborate system to restore what was never actually gone—and how a man brilliant enough to see what Protestantism had lost was blocked from finding it by the one thing his culture wouldn’t let him question.

Ryan Williamson AI and Writing

SFWA Banned AI from the Nebulas While Stanford Was Cataloguing Why It Could Never Win One

A new Caltech/Stanford survey paper just systematically catalogued how and why large language models fail at reasoning—fundamental architectural failures, unfaithful reasoning, robustness breakdowns, embodied reasoning collapse. The taxonomy maps with uncomfortable precision onto experiments I’ve been running against my own manuscripts for months: three AI systems giving three different sets of confident wrong developmental editing notes, models defending rewrites with sophisticated terminology that was completely wrong, spatial coherence failures Claude itself could diagnose but not prevent. The paper organizes hundreds of studies into a framework that makes the patterns impossible to dismiss as anecdotal. Meanwhile, SFWA wrote emergency policy to protect the Nebulas from a threat the research says doesn’t exist.

Ryan Williamson AI and Writing

The Most Advanced LLM on the Planet Still Can’t Write a Fourteen-Year-Old

Anthropic’s Opus 4.6—arguably the most advanced LLM on the planet—wrote a scene from my YA space opera manuscript. The prose was clean, the structure was sound, the emotional beats landed. Then I fed both its writing and mine back to it blind, and it confidently picked itself as the human writer. It praised its own metaphor as “organic” rather than constructed, dismissed the actual trauma writing as “about trauma rather than performing trauma,” and insisted its version was better even after being told who wrote which and admitting mine had authentic voice its version lacked. The most sophisticated AI model available wrote a good scene, evaluated it against my version, and was predictably wrong about everything that mattered.

Ryan Williamson Religion

It’s Just Tuesday for Catholics

A seventh-generation Mormon walked into a Catholic church for the first time, thought it was all pretty damn weird, and then started ugly crying during the liturgy with absolutely no idea why. It took seven more years to figure out what happened. Along the way, he sat down with Catholic and Orthodox priests and listed everything he’d lost when he left Mormonism — baptism for the dead, the endowment, celestial marriage, eternal progression, continuous revelation, priesthood authority. Every sacred thing Joseph Smith restored that had been lost in the Great Apostasy. The priests kept giving the same answer.

Ryan Williamson Commentary, Politics

Good Men Doing Something

In Minneapolis, ordinary people are standing outside schools in subzero temperatures watching for ICE vehicles so parents can pick up their kids safely. Coffee shops are handing out whistles so people can warn their neighbors. A public health nurse is standing bodily between immigrants and federal agents—not because she thinks she’ll fix the world, but because her neighbor needed a shield between them and the government. And it’s working.

Ryan Williamson Politics

Heritage Americans™

Vice President Vance wants to “redefine the meaning of American citizenship” around Americans with “real roots”—people MAGA calls “Heritage Americans.” Mere days after ICE agents murdered a 37-year-old American mother in Minneapolis while her wife watched in horror, DHS posted recruitment ads set to music popularized in neo-Nazi spaces, shared content from an account whose bio reads “Wake Up White Man,” and Secretary Noem stood behind a podium bearing the slogan “One of Ours, All of Yours.” Of the roughly 3,000 people arrested in the largest immigration enforcement operation ever carried out, 23 were Somali—the community it supposedly targeted. None had ties to the fraud cases under investigation. ICE is now the highest-funded law enforcement agency in the United States—enough to rank in the top fifteen military budgets on Earth—operating masked, in unmarked vehicles, without body cameras, and recruiting with neo-Nazi anthems.

Ryan Williamson Politics

When Jonathan Rauch Says It’s Fascism, It’s Fascism

Jonathan Rauch built his entire career on defending liberal institutions, avoiding inflammatory language, and making careful distinctions. Sam Harris is famous for being measured to a fault—sometimes maddeningly so. When both independently conclude the F-word is the only accurate descriptor for Trump’s governing style, it’s not hyperbole. It’s documentation. Rauch’s Atlantic piece “Yes, It’s Fascism” dropped last Sunday. Today Harris hosted him for a conversation with the same title. The first thirty minutes are free—and Harris asks the question I’ve been asking since Alex Pretti was killed: “Where the hell are the conservative gun owners on this?”

Ryan Williamson Politics

Checking In on the Bill of Rights

The Bill of Rights has ten amendments. In his first year back in office, Trump has violated eight of them—documented by federal courts, not partisan interpretation. First Amendment: targeting law firms, arresting journalists. Second Amendment: Pretti. Fourth: warrantless arrests and racial profiling. Fifth: a federal court ruling that executive orders violated “rights to equal protection and due process.” Sixth: same ruling, right to counsel. Eighth: sending people to a notorious Salvadoran prison for torture. Ninth and Tenth: stripping state authority and demanding voter rolls. The only amendments still standing are the Third and Seventh. At this rate, expect troops billeted in Democrats’ homes by March.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Ryan Williamson Commentary

Less Than Half of One Percent

I wrote a farewell post about silence being more insidious than hostility, and a guy who was silent for the entirety of my presence on Twitter showed up to be hostile at the end. Of nearly 4,000 followers, less than half of one percent ever engaged positively on anything that really mattered—and I know each of them by name. The rest? Hate follows, lurkers, tourists, a meaningless vanity metric. When the only interactions on posts about federal agents shooting American citizens and government agencies posting Nazi slogans are hostile, that tells you everything you need to know about who your audience is and what to do about it.