They weren't used for anything to do with the awards. There are no judges involved in picking the award finalists; they are selected based on votes submitted by

They weren't used for anything to do with the awards. There are no judges involved in picking the award finalists; they are selected based on votes submitted by anyone who paid for a membership in the convention. The administrators only have to count the votes and make sure that the finalists selected are actually eligible (right publication date, length, and so on for the category). They were used for looking for red flags about people who applied to be part of one of the hundreds of panels that take place during the convention. Frankly, I doubt this would have been a problem normally, but Worldcon's core audience is very sensitive about LLM usage right now due to all of the rhetoric about LLMs replacing writers.