The first thing to know about the NaNoWriMo issues I am about to discuss is that one of its premiere sponsors is an AI writing company.
NaNoWriMo, for those of you who do not know, is an annual program where people from all over the world attempt to write a fifty-thousand-word novel during the month of November. Now, in the modern, commercial sense, fifty thousand words is not actually a novel. And fifty-thousand words produced in thirty days are unlikely to be ready for anything other than serious editing. But that is fine — the stated goal of the project is to help people get over the fear of bad writing and just to write. In theory, the pace is so fast that you don’t have time to be paralyzed by how much you suck.
I have never completed the challenge, though I did attempt it once or twice back when it was first becoming noticeable. I work in IT — November is when work ramps up to make the holiday code freeze deadlines. Plus, I like my family. I am not spending Thanskgiving Weekend holed up with a word processor when I can spend that time being mocked by my loved ones when the Cowboys lose on Thanksgiving Day. But I certainly see the value — I only consistently started finishing books and screenplays when I discovered that creating and following an outline gave me permission to just write and clean up afterwards. Many people did, and the project grew significantly into the 2000s and 2010s.
The second thing the know about the NaNoWriMo is that they apparently knew of grooming issues for years and did little to nothing to correct them.
NaNoWriMo is not what it once was. The above-mentioned scandal, the loss of its founder (before the activities in the scandal, I believe) and the gradual expansion of its mission (there are screenwriting and editing months now, too) caused an apparent loss of participants and donations. The organization running NaNoWriMo has taken sponsors for much of its existence, but now it apparently relies on those sponsors for a higher percentage of its funding. Alienating a sponsor is not something the organization, apparently, can afford to do. And that might explain their latest misstep.
Earlier this week, NaNoWriMo released a statement claiming that opposition to AI writing tools, like the ones produced by one of their sponsors, was merely privilege speaking. In their words “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.” This is hooey. Infuriating hooey, but hooey all the same.
Both of my sons are, to use the modern parlance, non-neurotypical. Their conditions are different, and their struggles are real, but the one thing they have in common is an urge to create. From the time they were wee babes, they were constant artists. Drawing, photoshop, instruments — it was a consistent source of comfort to them in even the darkest times. One son builds rich, imaginative words in art. The other has taught himself to play the guitar to a professional level. What they have overcome to become the people, the artists, they are staggers me.
I spent significant portions of my younger life poor. Sometimes so poor that I did not know where my next meal was going to come from. And sometimes the next meal did not come. This didn’t really change until I was in my mid-twenties and clawed my way onto the corporate ladder via programming skills. At no point did I ever stop writing however, even if I was never any good at it. It was as central to my life as friends, family, and rooting for really bad sports teams.
The notions, then, that opposing AI is ableist or classicist is enraging. AI is bad for creative people. It was trained on material largely stolen from working authors. And yes, stolen is the right term. However the legal cases play out, the idea that taking people’s work wholesale without compensation and using that work to regurgitate material in the style of a specific author or to replace the workers they just copied, often with plagiarized material, is morally bankrupt. AI is aggressively mediocre — it can be nothing else since it just calculates what should come next based on training data and that means it drives toward the median results. And AI is an environmental disaster. Opposing it is in no way classist or ableist.
The very idea that poor or disabled people should have AI write for them is insulting. Everyone is capable of producing art, of creating something that contains a piece of them within it. AI cannot do that, and prompt engineering (which, speaking as an engineer, is a deeply, deeply inappropriate term) does nothing to convey that personality into the AI’s choices. Arguing that some people need AI because they cannot produce on their own because of certain limitations is repulsive.
Yes, some people are in positions where it is harder to create than others. But the solution to that is not a climate-destroying, wealth stealing, overly-mid word calculator. If the people at NaNoWriMo actually gave a damn about classism or ableism, they would be arguing for things that give everyone the space to be themselves. They would advocate for aggressive ADA enforcement, for placing accessibility at the front of programming, tooling, and physical design. They would be arguing for a jobs program or universal basic income. If they were concerned about minorities being underrepresented in publishing jobs and contracts, they would be yelling for more DEI, mentoring, and blind submissions. But they don’t actually give a damn about any of that.
If I wanted to be generous, I could chalk this up to them trying to protect people who misguidedly use AI to produce their works from the rhetorical consequences of those choices. But when someone insults my friends and loved ones, I am not inclined to generosity. I suspect that they are driven by the fallout of their own failings. If people use AI to generate fifty-thousand words and “win” NaNoWriMo, well, then, they have more “winners” to point to in order to encourage more people to join and donate. And, of course, as I mentioned at the top, one of the primary sponsors is an AI writing tool.
Money, as has been observed once or twice, corrupts. I sincerely doubt they would have leaned into this disingenuous nonsense if they did not have the sponsor they have (and no, I am not linking to the sponsor. I try not to reward bad behavior). But even if they are sincere, they are sincerely messed up. The idea that certain people aren’t good enough to write fifty-thousand rough draft words without the help of the mediocrity that is imitative AI is deeply, deeply insulting. What matters is the heart and soul people bring to their writing, not whether or not they produced a certain word count in a certain time period. Anyone who calls themselves a writer, or a reader, surely knows at least that much.
Anyone, it appears, except the people running NaNoWriMo.
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