I don't do NaNoWriMo because every month is novel-writing month for me. (I like to think of it as being akin to the vampires and monsters on Buffy having a night off for Halloween).
But I do vaguely follow NaNoWriMo from a distance, the same way an MMA fighter might stop to enjoy a punch-up between two drunks in the car park of Guzman e Gomez. And last week things got super punchy.
From The Verge:
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.
It’s pretty fucking weird, to be honest. The classist-ableist stuff sounds like po-faced 4Chan trolling. I mean, I understand that we’d all like to ‘reduce the financial burden of hiring human writing assistants, ’ but… actually, no, that’s not even a real thing.
As for “not all brains” have the “same abilities”, well duh.
But what I really don’t understand is why these guys would lead with the chin like this. Why open yourself to a flood of AI sludge? I don’t think there’s a prize for Nanowrimo, so it’s not like anyone has to wade through billions of words worth of submissions. But I don’t really see the point of running an event to encourage human writers (professional or amateur) to lean into their writing if what they’re going to lean into is writing prompts for ChatGPT. And I say this as someone who has no trouble using AI to do basic data management on manuscripts.
I think it’s probably just a symptom of the derangement that’s coming for everything with this stuff.