For those who do not set their watches by Twitter, first off-what's that like, and how can I join you? And second off, let's regroup and discuss the scandal at-large. To begin with, you have NaNoWriMo, which is a nickname for National Novel Writing Month, a nearly twenty-year-old organization whose premise is simple: write a novel in one month, specifically the month of November. It's a cool concept, and one that I've attempted before (in 2017, specifically), and one where failure honestly is not the end of the world. I didn't succeed in it in 2017, but I still made it 10k+ words more in a novel I was writing at the time. It's basically a social permission to actually start working on a novel, which for many people is a big part of the experience, and they do a good job of creating user tools, even advice/tips from published writers, and you get support from other novelists who are attempting what you do. It's a lot of work, but really fun, and for some people, it's a life-altering moment. Novels like Sara Gruen's Water for Elephants, Erin Morgenstern's The Night Circus, and Marissa Meyer's Cinder, all bestsellers, were originally NaNoWriMo novels.
NaNoWriMo, though, less than two months out from their event, issued a statement on Saturday announcing that they support the technology of AI to be used this year as part of its novel-writing experience. The direct quote was "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 erupted in a level of outrage from writers, both professional & novice online, who took offense at the concept of AI not, in fact, being a "cheat" when it came to writing and also the wording, implying that to stand against AI would be somehow ableist of classist.
I'm going to rip the bandaid off right now and own that I, too, think that NaNoWriMo's stance here is not just anti-art, but it's also bullshit, and I think it opens up a lot of conversations about what constitutes writing. Writing is meant to be a creative connection with material. That's true if you're doing something like what NaNoWriMo is doing, penning long-form creative fiction, but it's true of everything. Nonfiction, poetry, writing a daily blog...the whole point of this endeavor is to connect and do your own creative work. AI is frequently described as a another "tool" but it's not. This is not something like a rhyming dictionary or a thesaurus or spellcheck, something that is giving you a list of potential prompts to look through to understand the next step-it's doing all of the work for you, and in many ways skipping the human creative point of the writing. If all you had is an idea, I'm sorry, you're not a writer. You need to actually write the thing in front of you to write it, and AI doesn't count. You can say "join the future" or call someone a luddite, but writing involves a very specific set of tools & events. It involves debating, understanding what comes next, making mistakes & using words you know need to be corrected to push through. It is an emotional process, something that takes a lot of work...if it doesn't, there's nothing of value from it. I don't want to read what a machine wrote, and that's true whether it's a 1000-page book in front of me or a two-hour movie or a 500-word article, because without that touch of humanity, the writing part is just worthless...it will have the same emotional connection I have to an instruction manual. It's why you will never find an article on this blog that was written via AI...I'd rather give up the blog than rely on such a device.
Also, NaNoWriMo needing to justify its actions with "classist" and "ableist" titles is beyond offensive. Calling it ableist is truly beyond-the-pale, as it implies that people who have some sort of physical handicap are not able to write without the use of AI, which is absurd. John Milton was completely blind when he wrote Paradise Lost and Stephen Hawking was using a wheelchair to speak when he wrote A Brief History of Time...neither of them needed to have AI do their work in order to finish these esteemed bestsellers (I'm aware Paradise Lost being boiled down to a "bestseller" is a bit pedantic, but bare with me here). The only thing that AI does is makes it easier to be lazy with your writing, and to equate criticism of laziness as "ableist" is extremely offensive.
And to claim this is "classist" is absurd, and it invites other debates, including one from Twitter a couple of years ago where it was discussed whether or not it was okay to mock writers who "don't read very much" as ableist. So let's get this straight-every American (and NaNoWriMo, despite being an international competition, is an American non-profit) has access to an endless supply of books for free thanks to a public library system that you can find in every state (albeit one that Republicans are constantly attacking-yet another request to please vote in November). I have two library books on my dining room table right now, in fact-you don't need anything other than a library card (which anyone can get, for free) to check out books. So access to books is not classist. Writing is work-if you don't have time to do this because you're working multiple jobs, that sucks, but it's not classist to assume you need a shortcut. You just might need longer than a month to write your novel, which isn't the ethos of NaNoWriMo, but it is reality. Cause let's be honest-if forced to choose, is it more classist to assume that people have the time to finish a novel in a month or is it more classist to assume that people should stick to an arbitrary set of rules & use circumspect, environmentally-damaging technology to suck the soul out of their project? Real writers write, and write a lot. Real writers read, and read a lot. If you can't commit to those two activities, I'm sorry...you're not going to be a writer.
So where does this leave NaNoWriMo? It's still a good idea, and I hope that someone takes up the mantle of it (and also picks a better month to do it than November...between Thanksgiving & the election, it always feels like such a hassle to try to pull it off then as opposed to January or March, which both come with the added bonus of a 31st day to get your work done). But I would not trust them with it. Author Maureen Johnson, who has supported the organization in the past but asked to remove her support in the light of this controversy, pointed out that authors should beware that their work this year might be used to train AI, and indeed ProWritingAid (an AI writing company) is now one of the main sponsors for NaNoWriMo. It's hard not to wonder if this is less a way to help you achieve your dreams, and more to give mountains of creative material to improve future AI bots who want to strip the written word of its humanity.
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