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NaNoWriMo being paid to say it's fine if a soulless machine writes your story was not in my bingo card:
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:
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
"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.'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.
[...]
"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)?
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.”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.
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
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.”
— Casey Stegman (@cstegman) September 2, 2024
“Can you destroy it?”
“Ngl, pretty classist of you, tbh.” pic.twitter.com/mSOlnWjQrx
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, but fortunately there aren't any of them in my empire.
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