Listen to the Rain

NaNoWriMo being paid to say it's fine if a soulless machine writes your story was not in my bingo card:

"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 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."

[...]

"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. "
-What is NaNoWriMo's position on Artificial Intelligence (AI)?

If you're unfamiliar with NaNoWriMo (that seems unlikely on Dreamwidth, but you never know), in the past the position of NaNo--or at least, of most participants--was that the quality of the story was not particularly important because the point was to have the experience of needing to write a certain number of words per day, every day, in order to reach a goal. I've seen plenty of posts about how you should make everything a dream, kill off the main character, totally change genre, abandon the previous plot, turn everything that happened into a story that a new character was writing and then make the story about that character, whatever it takes to get to those 50,000 words. After all, you can always go back and edit a finished first draft, but if you don't have a finished draft you don't have a book.

They say that it's classist not to use AI because a lot of people can't afford an editor, but the NaNo I remember actively discouraged editing during the month, because if you're editing you're not writing new words.

This is a perfect example of the tendency for bullies to co-opt whatever the dominant language of their social group is. Reminds me of the Ana Mardoll thing, where Ana's whole persona was "im just such a smol bean uwu" while they constantly accused people who criticized them of ableism, classism, transphobia, or other bigotry, and then it turns out they're in their forties, got hired to work for Lockheed Martin due to family connections, and were just using social justice language as an in-group-acceptable way to be a massive jerk to people. Bad actors will find whatever the easiest, most effective way to act badly is.

It's similar to the discussion about difficulty in games like Dark Souls that require that you engage with the game a certain way and play with a certain precision and if you don't, you can't beat the game. Is it ableist to say that specific games must be played a certain way? Is the creative vision of the game designer(s) more or less important than the experience of the end user? This isn't a totally abstract thing for me, since I made a popular mod for Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead with a particular experience that I intend for it to create, and people keep mixing it with other mods that dilute that experience. Admittedly, I also created a bunch of tweaks to change that experience myself, the same way that a game like Celeste has a ton of possible difficulty sliders you can adjust to make the game much easier and require less technical precision. On the other hand, even if you use the settings to slow the game down, have infinite jumps, and skip stages you can't beat, it's still you playing it. Having an AI write even parts of your story is like watching a Let's Play of a game, a morally neutral activity, and then lying and saying that you played it and so you have a first-hand opinion on how it feels to play.

Okay, now that we've had that discussion, let me bring up the actual reason they did this--because they literally sold out to AI advocates:

Here’s a boring sentence I wrote: “Quinn entered the dark and cold forest.”

And here’s a sentence Rephrase gave me: “Quinn shivered as he stepped into the cold, dark forest, the air thick with the scent of damp earth.”

I can build off that! Now I’m more excited to write this scene that was feeling bland.

Sign up for ProWritingAid to get access to Rephrase and more than 20 in-depth writing reports.
-How to Unstick Your Camp NaNoWriMo Project

That sounds like it was written with AI, to be honest. This reminds me of that children's "book" ""author"" who generated some slop, generated some pictures to go with it, self-published the book and then said that they wrote a children's book. Just an insult to anyone who's actually ever created anything.

In looking up things about this I've learned that NaNo has gone through a lot of scandals in the last couple years for non-Butlerian reasons, though, so maybe this is par for the course.

Edit: hahaha

“It can’t be reasoned with. It can’t be bargained with. It will never stop.”

“Can you destroy it?”

“Ngl, pretty classist of you, tbh.” pic.twitter.com/mSOlnWjQrx

— Casey Stegman (@cstegman) September 2, 2024

I keep letting ideas and thoughts slide by without writing them here. On the other hand, at least I do still write occasionally. So many people on my friends list have basically stopped.

I managed to sing a whole song in Japanese at karaoke that I hadn't previously memorized, following the furigana fast enough to keep to the beat. Though it wasn't a particularly fast song: Kalafina's 光の旋律[1]. My earlier attempts to sing Don't Say Lazy and the song listed under current music both exploded against the lack of furigana and speed, though I could manage さくらんぼ's chorus. Not surprising because it sticks in your brain worse than Gaga[2], at least if you can make out the words. 愛し合う二人幸せの空隣どうしあなたのあたしさくらんぼ。。。もう一回！”

I really need to study Japanese more. Picking it up by osmosis is working, to a point, but, especially as I'm jobless at the moment, I really should just buckle down and study for a couple hours every single day. In the 10 months I've got left I could come pretty far, especially if I do manage to get into that class in the city I found on Hiroshima's website.

Every day, every moment, there's always the sense that I should be doing something else. Something more important. More likely to contribute to my life in some way. I'm beginning to suspect that this happens to everyone, to a greater or lesser degree. Much like the existential pondering about what one's life is really about (though that's a luxury of abundance, really).

I've been thinking a lot lately about the old Bungie game Myth, probably my favorite game they ever made (though I haven't played Marathon all the way through). I'm a sucker for dark fantasy, and Myth is one of the better ones, though more in terms of worldbuilding rather than morality. It's a bit like the Black Company novels, actually--the men and women of the Legion slogging it out with Thralls[3] and Soulless in thigh-deep mud while their Avatara high commanders fight badass magical duels with the Fallen Lords offscreen.

The names were really evocative as well. Balor. Soulblighter, the Twice-Born. The Watcher, Mad Goat of the Fens. Shiver. The Deceiver. The Trow, and their "melted cities" in the north. The Myrkridia, the ancient monsters that almost drove humanity to extinction, who you never see in the first game. The Avatara: Murgen, Alric, Cu Roi, Rabican and Maeldun. Muirthemne, the ancient empire destroyed by the Dark during the first few years of the war. They're obviously taken from Irish myth as a base, which was pretty new to me when I first encountered them.

Myth also brought us The Siege of Madrigal, which showed up as an Easter Egg in all of the Halo games.

The main reason I've been thinking about it is that NaNoWriMo is coming up, and I'm thinking about doing it again this year. My current idea is to do a zombie apocalypse story in a fantasy setting. I'm a bit worried that it would turn out like the plot of Myth, but that's not too much of a bad thing. Maybe if I have a more direct source of inspiration I'll actually manage to finish a novel fragment for once instead of getting a hundred pages in and losing momentum. Maybe I should just finish my last NaNo for this one. I have five or six half or three-quarters finished novels of varying quality. When I get that far, I always get torn between editing the earlier parts and continuing writing, and eventually just lose the momentum to continue. I think what I really need to do is keep outlines of my plots to make sure that I don't lose my place, and to keep things straight when I make a change halfway through the game.

Well, I still have a while to decide.

[1]: If you don't speak Japanese, hope you know Spanish and can read the subs. :p
[2]: I don't actually hate her music, I hate how it takes DAYS to leave your brain if you hear it. Though maybe that's just me.
[3]: Zombies

五万つ言葉を書きました!

The third time I've tried it, and the only time I managed to get anywhere really past halfway. Fifty thousand words in just over three weeks.

And I'm still not done with the story. Oh well...I can finish that. This is a lot easier to write than any of my other novels were, and finishing it won't be so bad.

And hey, maybe I'll have something publishable when I'm done!

This is partially an update and partially a test of my new userpic :-p

We've picked out a time and a place for the wedding. We should be sending out invitations within the next month or so. It depends entirely on how much of my/our time is taken up with NaNoing and filling out our JET applications. Speaking of which, I need to work on my essay...

NaNo is going well. Up to 13K words on day 6. I'll be done with plenty of time to spare if I keep my current pace. I might even finish my novel, which would be amazing.

Life is good. I like it that way.