This week, I made the difficult decision to resign from the committee of Oor Vyce. While I will remain a member as I have been since June 2020, I no longer sit on the committee or hold an official role. The reason given at the Annual General Meeting (AGM), that I need to focus on my day job and the expansion of oorNews, is entirely true. However, it is not the whole truth.

I am stepping down to save the time of volunteers at Oor Vyce. For months, the organisation has been subjected to a relentless campaign of distraction and complaint by author and journalist Emma Grae (Emma Guinness). Valuable time that should have been spent championing the Scottish Languages Act was instead wasted dealing with spurious allegations designed to silence or deplatform those of us who do not share her specific vision for the language.

I feel it is time to set the record straight, not out of anger, but out of a genuine concern for the health of our community.

The Rush to Judgment: Anatomy of a Misunderstanding

From the very beginning of oorNews, the reaction from Emma Grae was not one of inquiry, but of immediate hostility based on false assumptions. It is important to correct the record regarding the specific claims that launched this campaign, as they paint a picture of an organisation that simply does not exist.

The “Stolen Data” Myth:
The campaign began with the frightening accusation that we intended to use “SCOTS LANGUAGE TEXTS” without consent to train our model. This claim, which naturally caused fear among authors like Susi Briggs, was completely unfounded. We stated clearly that our model is trained on our own data: technical prose generated for the specific purpose of handling high-register Scots. We do not scrape creative writing; we build tools for business and law.

“No Balls” to Reply:
Much was made of the fact that I supposedly “didn’t have the balls” to reply to Emma’s initial email enquiry. In reality, as a volunteer with a full-time job and a young family, I simply hadn’t seen it. The email had arrived just hours before the public denunciation began. There was no refusal to engage, only a lack of grace given to a fellow human being with a busy life.

“Grifter Behaviour”:
Perhaps most hurtful was the characterisation of our project as “total grifter behaviour”. When we expressed a long-term hope that profitability might one day allow us to hire human photographers and artists, this was mocked with a GIF captioned “the thrusting of greedy little hands”. oorNews has made zero profit to date. I am a volunteer investing my own time and money, yet my aspiration to create paid work for others were twisted into evidence of greed.

Dragging in the Community:
This was not kept as a disagreement between two people. Respected figures in the Scots community were publicly tagged into these threads on X, like Billy Kay who (along with others) I had previously communicated with via email and video call prior to launching oorNews. This tactic forced other writers to take sides based on incomplete information, fracturing the very community we should be uniting.

The Oor Vyce Gaitherin Claims:
Prior to the Oor Vyce Gaitherin in 2025, public videos incorrectly asserted that I would be using the event as a vehicle to petition the Scottish Government for funding to build a language model. This was entirely unfounded. I attended the event in my capacity as Secretary simply to welcome attendees, register guests, and participate in workshops. Furthermore, I have already curated a community-endorsed database and fine-tuned the oorNews model entirely at my own personal expense. From day one, my transparent goal has been to operate an independent, self-sustaining platform funded through advertising for businesses that actively encourage the use of Scots by their staff and customers, rather than seeking government grants.

Mischaracterising Promotional Efforts:
Just prior to my resignation, further committee time was unnecessarily consumed over a positive video I created to promote our AGM. When a public commenter inaccurately claimed that Oor Vyce played no role in Scots achieving official language status, I responded by highlighting the pivotal 2021 Scots Pledge, which Oor Vyce led to secure vital cross-party support. Emma framed my video as spreading “misinformation” based on a comment that itself was inaccurate, creating yet another administrative distraction from a genuinely positive promotional effort.

The Real Cost: The Loss of Chris Gilmour’s Work

The most heartbreaking aspect of this recent “fecht” is not the attacks on me, but the collateral damage inflicted on independent researchers. The case of Chris Gilmour is a stark example of the real harm being done.

Chris, a dedicated independent researcher, had built the Corpus of 21st Century Scots Texts, a monumental resource for our language. Yet, he was branded a “parasite” and falsely accused of allowing his work to be “plundered” by AI. The tragedy is that these accusations were baseless. Chris offered to show via website logs that his specific data had not been scraped in the way alleged, but the wave of public hostility left him no choice but to withdraw his labour and take the resource down.

Furthermore, it was pointed out to Emma that some of her own writing was available on the Scots Language Centre website without security measures. Yet this fact, which contradicted her narrative of unique victimhood at the hands of small creators, was ignored. We cannot build a community if we tear down our own builders.

A Plea for Nuance Over Narrative

The most serious escalation involved my recent interaction on X, which was reported to MSPs and Oor Vyce leadership as evidence that I was “aligning with the gender critical movement”. This is a serious distortion that requires context.

The comment in question was made on a thread concerning a false statement about J.K. Rowling that Emma had stated and then deleted following backlash about her statement. Far from being a political statement on gender, my comment was a call for consistency and decency. I explicitly stated that I had “nae desire to see fowk mistreatit (includin Emma Grae)”. My intent was to call out the nastiness she was receiving, which mirrored the very “pile-ons” she has directed at smaller creators like oorNews and Chris Gilmour.

I was holding up a mirror to her behaviour. I pointed out that she “chynged her choon” (changed her tune) and deleted false accusations when faced with someone powerful like J.K. Rowling who has the means to fight back, yet she continues to spread falsehoods about smaller projects that lack those resources. To twist a plea for fair treatment into a political smear is deeply damaging and distracting. oorNews has always been, and remains, a project committed to inclusivity.

The “Broad Scots” Vision

This brings us to the heart of the disagreement. oorNews is unapologetically aiming for a high-register, technical Broad Scots. We consciously exclude English-blended Scots (words like “too”, “much”, “those” or “fly”) from our training data because we want to preserve the distinct glue of our language and always use the Scots cognate of the English word if it exists (has the same meaning and is in use by living speakers) during translation. As you will see from the style at oorNews we do not shy away from our rich shared vocabulary with English, but from a translation model training perspective seek to stick with Scots cognates (i.e. “tae”, “muckle”, “thae” an “flee”), as well as grammar and idiom.

We understand that Emma Grae comes from a different school of thought, one that perhaps sees “standards” as restrictive. That is a valid artistic choice for a novelist and is to be celebrated and considered equally valid Scots, in the same way all dialects of Scots are equally valid. But it is not grounds to try and destroy a project aiming for technical precision. There is room for both approaches. We should be debating linguistics, not trying to burn down each other’s platforms.

David vs. Goliath

oorNews is a small, volunteer-run project. We do not have the weight of a major publisher, nor the backing of an American-owned media giant like The National. But thousands of you read us every month because you care about seeing your language used in serious, technical contexts.

To Emma, and to those who have followed this campaign: I ask you to consider who you are fighting. We are not “Big Tech” stealing your work. We are fellow enthusiasts, spending our evenings and weekends trying to ensure Scots has a future in the digital age.

I have resigned to stop the distraction, but I will not stop the work. Let us be kinder to one another, and let us judge projects by what they build, not by the rumours spread to tear them down.