NaNoWriMo sells out to AI

We are living in an age of conflicting values — not just between camps in the culture wars, but in ourselves. We don’t know how to think about art, AI, or any of this.

The online artist and writing community has taken a very strong stance against AI. I have my quibbles with how this stance is articulated,¹ but I am in favor of the stance overall. Simply put: AI is bad, artists and writers should avoid it, and that settles the matter.

Unfortunately, NaNoWriMo does not share that stance.

The Writer Santō Kyōden

For those who do not know: NaNoWriMo is a name for both an event and an organization (the full name is actually National Novel Writing Month). The organization holds an annual event in November in which authors around the world attempt to draft a complete novel of a minimum of 50,000 words in a single month.

It is a ludicrous idea, and it is an idea that I love. I have participated in NaNoWriMo before, and I have ‘won’ once (meaning I made it past 50,000 words).

The organization is, unfortunately, not well-functioning. Last year, concerns were raised about a forum moderator potentially being a child predator; I can’t speak to the specifics or the veracity of the claims. But I followed it from afar, and I saw an organization that was defensive and slow to act. They eventually shut down their forums. Many people lost trust in the organization, but the spirit of the event was maintained.

Now NaNoWriMo has decided to take a position on AI.

I want to draw attention to this because it reveals a real tension in how we as a culture are thinking about AI. We are living in an age of conflicting values — not just between camps in the culture wars, but in ourselves. We don’t know how to think about art, AI, or any of this.

Design for a Machine

Orignally, NaNoWriMo wrote the following:

NaNoWriMo does not explicitly support any specific approach to writing, nor does it explicitly condemn any approach, including the use of AI. NaNoWriMo's mission is to "provide the structure, community, and encouragement to help people use their voices, achieve creative goals, and build new worlds—on and off the page." We fulfill our mission by supporting the humans doing the writing. Please see this related post that speaks to our overall position on nondiscrimination with respect to approaches to creativity, writer's resources, and personal choice. 

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 a grating statement for a few reasons. For one, the statement doesn’t talk about what AI is, how it could be properly used, and (more importantly) how it could be improperly used. For a community based on the idea of writing (and especially communal writing), the idea of using AI to write is an affront.

The second issue is that final sentence: the vague accusation of classism and ableism. I think people have become tired of vague insinuations of bigotry. If you really think that condemning AI is classist and ableist, you need to say why in order to be taken seriously. Simply gesturing at the possibility of a chance of bigotry, or alluding to some undefined privilege, isn’t enough. (Incidentally, this is good writing advice: be specific with your descriptions.)

Wire reported on this, and here is how a longtime NaNoWriMo participant responded:

Jenai May was a participant in NaNo for more than two decades and a volunteer leader, also known as a municipal liaison, for her local region for about half of that time. NaNoWriMo typically boasts a volunteer force of nearly 800 leaders and coordinators, but many have recently left the organization, according to several sources.

May credits NaNoWriMo with giving her the confidence she needed to believe she could write a book, “with an inner transformation that was so powerful, I dedicated 10 years of my life to volunteering for them year-round.”

May is herself neurodivergent, and says that many writers in her region are either poor or disabled. “NaNoWriMo's stance that poor and disabled writers should use AI in order to write well and succeed is disgusting. And calling critics of AI ableist and classist is truly bizarre,” she says.

Eventually, the organization said more, adding the following definitions of their terms.

• 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.

• 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. 

• 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

I can’t speak for some of these claims – the claims about publishing contracts, for instance, could be empirically supported – but I do think it is worth addressing what they get wrong (and, in some limited cases, what they get right).

I have three main points I want to make.

Writing, editing, and copyediting are distinct

This observation might seem trivial, but I do think this matters.