Full disclosure: I haven’t actually participated in NaNoWriMo or Camp NaNoWriMo in some time. Something about the way I work now is no longer compatible with the NaNo schedule.
I heard about the grooming allegations leveled against some of the forum moderators last year, and that further put me off of NaNoWriMo.
If I’d ever had any thoughts of going back, the news that made the rounds today ended that for good.
As Kamala Harris said in a wholly different context a couple of weeks ago, “Simply put: They are out of their minds.”
They’re not just embracing AI. Oh no. They’re actually using social justice language to try to justify this.
“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.”
Ok, look: Realistically, there’s nothing NaNoWriMo can do to prevent their participants from using AI to complete their work. NaNo has always run on the honor system. You could type the word “snot” 50,000 times and run it through the validator and technically, that’d be a win. We all know this.
But this cement-brained defense of AI use needs to be picked apart. Here is their three-pronged argument, followed by my rebuttals.
“Classism. Not all writers have the financial ability to hire humans to help at certain phases of their writing. For some writers, the decision to use AI is a practical, not an ideological, one. The financial ability to engage a human for feedback and review assumes a level of privilege that not all community members possess.”
This is, in a word, ridiculous. Yes, a good editor or a good workshop will be expensive. But those are not required. It is entirely possible to become a published author without ever hiring anyone to help you with your writing. Make friends with writers who are at your general level of writing. Look at one of the many sites that matches critique partners. Ask friends to beta read for you. Try to get into one of the author mentoring contests that still run on social media. None of this costs money. Is it easy to do all this? No. But nothing about being an author is easy. Sorry!
(Don’t even get me started on the implication that most authors have tons of disposable income. Hoo boy.)
“Ableism. Not all brains have same abilities and not all writers function at the same level of education or proficiency in the language in which they are writing. Some brains and ability levels require outside help or accommodations to achieve certain goals. The notion that all writers “should“ be able to perform certain functions independently or is a position that we disagree with wholeheartedly. There is a wealth of reasons why individuals can’t “see” the issues in their writing without help.”
And again, you don’t need to use an unethical AI program that’s trained itself on volumes of work stolen from authors to address those issues. My Twitter feed is chockablock with authors who are on the spectrum or otherwise neurodivergent. None of them uses AI. Several of them were really offended by NaNo’s implication that they’d need AI to get the job done. Most of them have beta readers and critique partners, which, again, you do not ever have to pay for.
“General Access Issues. All of these considerations exist within a larger system in which writers don’t always have equal access to resources along the chain. For example, underrepresented minorities are less likely to be offered traditional publishing contracts, which places some, by default, into the indie author space, which inequitably creates upfront cost burdens that authors who do not suffer from systemic discrimination may have to incur.”
All of this is 100% true. What the hell does it have to do with AI use?
This all just really, really sucks. The thing that first drew me to NaNoWriMo was Chris Baty’s book about participating in the program and the sheer joy of putting down words that slowly but surely came together to form a novel, something I didn’t believe I could ever do until I won NaNoWriMo 2011. Tidepool and The Keeper of the Key started life as NaNoWriMo novels. There was a time I was one of NaNoWriMo’s biggest defenders when other authors would shit all over it. http://nicolewillson.com/blog/in-defense-of-nanowrimo/
But I’m done. NaNo’s current stance on using AI is the opposite of promoting creativity. Where’s the joy in “writing” something that a computer program scraped from other authors’ works and spat out for you?
Furthermore, every publication or contest I’ve submitted to recently has required me to verify that no part of my submission was created with AI. And I’ve always taken a lot of pride in verifying that my work, good or bad, is all mine.