The organization behind National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) is being slammed online after it claimed that opposing the use of AI writing tools is “classist and ableist.” On Saturday, NaNoWriMo published its stance on the technology, announcing that it doesn’t explicitly support or condemn any approach to writing.
“We believe that to categorically condemn AI would be to ignore classist and ableist issues surrounding the use of the technology, and that questions around the use of AI tie to questions around privilege,” NaNoWriMo said, arguing that “not all brains” have the “same abilities” and that AI tools can reduce the financial burden of hiring human writing assistants.
NaNoWriMo’s annual creative writing event is the organization’s flagship program that challenges participants to create a 50,000-word manuscript every November. Last year, the organization said that it accepts novels written with the help of AI apps like ChatGPT but noted that doing so for the entire submission “would defeat the purpose of the challenge.”
Worst part is, NaNoWriMo is a good practice tool to help people get past the initial apprehension about writing a novel, because a novel-sized work is a big undertaking. Throwing AI in there defeats that purpose.
I used to have a friend that NaNoWriMo every year and would update her progress on live journal. I always took the exercise to be what you’re describe, just an event to get people to write not even particularly well. Having your foundation saying that people not writing in your writing event is wild.
I would say that it is a good practice tool in a legitimate way. The same way exercising every day in a low-impact way for a few weeks before moving on to a higher impact workout. The original might not help much building muscles, but they get those muscles prepared for the harder work.
I’m not a writer, but my dad wrote a ton of academic books and my mom writes novels. Both say you have to write every day to keep in practice.