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.”
not all brains” have the “same abilities” and that AI tools can reduce the financial burden of hiring human writing assistants
The path to equality does not necessarily lie in degrading the value of human creativity.
NaNoWriMo’s annual creative writing event is the organization’s flagship program that challenges participants to create a 50,000-word manuscript every November.
I would prefer to write 1,000 good words slowly than right 50,000 ungood word fastlier.
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.
If you have Dyslexia then ChatGPT is a better spellcheck than whatever’s in your writing software. I won’t pretend to know all the applications of AI to help neurodiverse people to write but there are ways to use AI in writing that is very helpful to them. I wouldn’t say having AI blurt out 50,000 words of nothing is particularly helpful to any writer though.
I can see the benefits of AI in certain fields of work but why would you want it to take over in the creative industry? Isn’t tapping into your own creativity the fun part?
Nanowrimo is already in flames because of last years ‘groomer mod’ scandal. Why would they choose now to weigh in on such a controversial topic rather than working on filling all the staff vacancies, rebuilding trust in their community, and developing new volunteers to replace all the ones they fired and ghosted? All they’ve got to do here is keep their mouths shut and rebuild the damn organization and they can’t even do that…
You’re going to make me look that up, aren’t you? Here’s a good summary of said ‘groomer mod’ scandal.
Isn’t the whole point to challenge yourself by writing a novel? I wouldn’t submit whatever I wrote because writing a novel in a month means it’s probably not going to be very good.
I mean I don’t care one way or the other if people use ChatGPT to do this, but it seems like they’re not really challenging themselves.
Fucking horrid.
One problem, if it even is a problem, is that NaNoWriMo uses a honour system for the word counts. They had word count verification in past but it accepted “obfuscated” manuscripts (each letter replaced with random letters, or something similar). They don’t have any way of assessing the quality of the writing, and that absolutely goes against the spirit of the event anyway.
(For a lot of writers this could be the first time they try writing a novel. Last thing they want is an algorithm rejecting their work if it sounds too much like AI. That’d be fucking horrible.)
Ultimately, NaNoWriMo isn’t about quality of writing, it’s about getting into the habit producing text for 30 days. Using any AI to create novel text goes straight up against that idea.
I’ve always said it’s OK that you’re not producing your 100% best prose in some NaNoWriMo days. Or just come up with tangentially related ramblings. It’s, uh, a postmodern composition technique. But try to use a brain, OK? AI will just produce irrelevant nonsense. One of my fave technique is that if I’m really desperate in NaNoWriMo, I fire up lipsum.com and generate a day’s worth of lorem lipsum nonsense. I can do it once. Then I must remove words from that block if I exceed the daily quota.
Has writing the novel changed in the last several decades? It used to be very rare that any given writer would hit the best seller list, everyone else was steered towards taking writing classes or purchasing somewhat pricey seminars. What is the motive to defend AI writing bots? AI isn’t going to be purchasing seminars or taking classes.
“Generative AI empowers not the artist, not the writer, but the tech industry,” Star Wars: Aftermath author Chuck Wendig said in response to NaNoWriMo’s stance. “It steals content to remake content, graverobbing existing material to staple together its Frankensteinian idea of art and story.”
Their announcement reads like an update of the classic “If by Whisky” speech.
While I wouldn’t condone using an AI to create an entire novel, I would be fine with a human using ChatGPT to generate topics, prompts, and check spelling & grammar.
AI is a tool. It can be used for good, and it can be used for bad. Much like a hammer. There are both good and bad ways to use them.
There’s no reason for there to be prohibition of AI generation; just prohibition of AI Generation being the only source of text.
