I am shocked, absolutely shocked at this news that the National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) organization released a statement in support of using AI to write novels. For those that don’t know, this organization centers around an annual event encouraging authors to write a 50 000 word novel over the month of November. I participated twice, “Children of the Earth” and “Chasing a Reason” both started as my entries in NaNoWriMo.
They claim they support AI as it allows for people with disabilities and people with financial struggles to write novels. This is an utterly brainless take and is offensive to the authors they claim to be supporting by their statement.
Writing a novel, writing in general, is not a classist or ableist endeavor. There are countless authors who wrote from places of abject poverty. Countless authors who have written while dealing with cognitive disabilities. The only way I could see AI being used to write that helps someone with a disability is in a speech to text manner, where they lack the physical ability to type so speaking a novel into a machine-learning text to speech tool is the only way they can get their ideas on paper. Using generative AI to write is not writing.
It’s the same as using AI to generate an image and calling yourself an artist. The whole point of the NaNoWriMo challenge was to push yourself as an author, to prove you had the ability to write a (short) novel. Just entering a prompt into an AI and refining the work is not writing, it is hitting copy/paste at best, at worst it is plagiarism as the AI’s are trained on human writer’s work.
Don’t get me wrong, I am not against AI, I think it is a powerful tool and super useful. It has helped me a lot in my job and with my thumbnail creation for YouTube videos. I use it all the time, but I would never enter a prompt and let whatever it spit out get published and then dare to call myself an author.
It’s an insult to say that those with rough backgrounds or cognitive disabilities need AI to write. They can write perfectly fine, with their own authorial voice, without the help of AI. This is a perfect example of what people complain about when it comes to the “woke” left. An effort of inclusion gone to the realm of utter satire.
I am disgusted by this and will never again participate in a NaNoWriMo event. This move by them is an insult. And that is coming from an author with a cognitive “disability”, I have Autism Spectrum Disorder, I am very far removed from the more severe symptoms of Autism but I still struggle with it. Emotion and human interaction are hard for me, but if anything I find it helps my writing. It helps me notice things and describe them to build a world. The fact that this organization would think someone like me would need the help of an AI to write a novel is disgusting. I feel ashamed to have participated in their event’s in the past.
I know no one from their org will ever see it and that I am the smallest of small fries when it comes to authors, but I just needed to share that. Get it off my chest, because it was a organization I had supported in the past and it had helped me get a start on books I was being lazy about. Now it feels tainted.