September 3, 2024, 2:23pm
NaNoWriMo, the tongue-twister acronym for National Novel Writing Month, was in the hot seat on social media this weekend for their support of AI writing. The organization facilitates a community of people who sprint to finish a manuscript over the course of November, and said condemnation of AI writing tools is ableist, classist, and privileged.
People online were pissed:
Nanowrimo using AI is total bullshit. I’m embarrassed for them. Just say you wanted the money they’re giving you instead of trying to ennoble nonsense.
— Roxane Gay (@roxanegay.bsky.social) 2024-09-02T19:17:26.176Z
thanks to ai I just finished my nanowrimo novel a few months early. I’m excited to read it
Thread. The number of disabled writers I’ve seen calling out NaNoWriMo on this should give that organization pause. It really does feel that the organization was employing the “classist, ableist” phrasing to pre-emptively shut down any legit criticism of their partnership with an AI company.
And there’s even been a resignation from the organization’s board:
Hello @NaNoWriMo this is me DJO officially stepping down from your Writers Board and urging every writer I know to do the same. Never use my name in your promo again in fact never say my name at all and never email me again. Thanks! https://t.co/KDKZ0zVx3H
— Daniel José Older (@djolder) September 2, 2024
National Novel Writing Month’s general take on AI is that they don’t want to dismiss AI, because “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.” In their framing, AI allows everyone to write despite differences in financial abilities, differences in physical and mental ability, and differences in access to resources. Overall they don’t want to stand in the way of new resources that could be useful to writers, explaining that they “see value in sharing resources and information about AI and any emerging technology, issue, or discussion that is relevant to the writing community as a whole,” and adding that “it’s healthy for writers to be curious about what’s new and forthcoming, and what might impact their career space or their pursuit of the craft.”
There’s more about their stance on their website, including an update that stresses that “though we find the categorical condemnation for AI to be problematic … we are troubled by situational abuse of AI, and that certain situational abuses clearly conflict with our values.” I’d be curious to know which situations are bad and which are good.
I think the good faith reading of all this is that the NaNoWriMo organization sees itself as the facilitator of a large community, and wants to be welcoming by keeping its tent as big as possible. Closing their doors to people over definitions of how to write and what tools are okay to use might seem outside of their mission, I would guess, equivalent to insisting all of their participants use blue pens.
I’m not sure I buy it. Coincidentally, this all happened over the same long weekend that The New Yorker published Ted Chiang’s excellent piece on why “AI Isn’t Going To Make Art.” I think Chiang’s piece clearly articulates much of what made people so upset at NaNoWriMo, particularly the claims that being against AI is ableist and classist.
The claim NaNoWriMo is making seems to hinge on looking at AI generators as a tool for people who might otherwise not be able to write, something like a voice-to-text program that allows someone with limited use of their hands to write without a keyboard, or a spellchecker that helps someone who doesn’t have the money to hire a copy editor, or a collection of query letter samples for someone who isn’t connected in publishing. But I don’t think AI is equivalent to those tools. The way people are using these programs is different than choosing to use a pen instead of a pencil; AI is so different that to me and a lot of people, it no longer seems like the art of writing at all. As Chiang writes in The New Yorker, creating art is more than just plugging an idea into a machine: “What I’m saying is that art requires making choices at every scale; the countless small-scale choices made during implementation are just as important to the final product as the few large-scale choices made during the conception.”
As a result, AI sidesteps what a lot of us think of as the process of writing, that is, using a form like a novel to express ourselves, not just at the level of a novel’s broad premise, but more granularly at the level of characters, scenes, sentences, word choices. Deciding that those choices don’t matter in the process of writing a novel, is not reaching for a different tool to express yourself; it’s deciding to abandon the entire process of writing a novel.
As Chiang writes, “Generative A.I. appeals to people who think they can express themselves in a medium without actually working in that medium.”