What has NaNoWriMo said about AI - and why are people unhappy about it?

As if NaNoWriMo – short for National Novel Writing Month, where writers pen a 50,000 book in the month of November – wasn’t intense enough, those behind the project are facing a wave of criticism over its position on the use of artificial intelligence (AI), after they claimed the “categorical condemnation” of AI in writing has “classist and ableist undertones”.

In a statement issued last week, the organisation said it neither explicitly supports nor condemns “any specific approach to writing”, including the use of AI.

It reads: “We want to be clear in our belief that the categorical condemnation of artificial intelligence has classist and ableist undertones, and that questions around the use of AI tie to questions around privilege.

“Classism: Not all writers have the financial ability to hire humans to help at certain phases of their writing. For some writers, the decision to use AI is a practical, not an ideological, one. The financial ability to engage a human for feedback and review assumes a level of privilege that not all community members possess.

“Ableism: Not all brains have the same abilities and not all writers function at the same level of education or proficiency in the language in which they are writing … The notion that all writers ‘should’ be able to perform certain functions independently is a position that we disagree with wholeheartedly. There is a wealth of reasons why individuals can’t ‘see’ the issues in their writing without help.”

NaNoWriMo added there are also “general access issues” around AI in that “writers don’t always have equal access to resources along the chain” – such as underrepresented minorities being “less likely to be offered traditional publishing contracts”.

This statement was later updated with an additional paragraph in which the organisation acknowledged “there are bad actors in the AI space” causing harm to writers and “acting unethically”, but doubled down on ruling out the categorical condemnation of AI.

“We want to make clear that, though we find the categorical condemnation for AI to be problematic for the reasons stated below, we are troubled by situational abuse of AI, and that certain situational abuses clearly conflict with our values.

“We also want to make clear that AI is a large umbrella technology and that the size and complexity of that category (which includes both non-generative and generative AI, among other uses) contributes to our belief that it is simply too big to categorically endorse or not endorse.”

However, this didn’t go down well with the community, with a number of writers board members stepping down from their positions:

Daniel José Older, a fantasy author, also issued a statement in his Substack newsletter in which he wrote that generative AI is “garbage”.

He said: “It is terrible for humanity and it is terrible for the environment. It kills jobs and it kills plants and animals. Also, it makes cursed, soulless garbage. And it steals s*** (and I mean s*** affectionately here) without permission, s*** that people worked hard on and poured their heart and soul into, and repurposes that s*** into said cursed soulless garbage.

“AI is another clown-shaped bubble that is about to pop, and go the way of NFTs. It can’t happen fast enough.”

And with NaNoWriMo commenting on ableism, disabled authors have also spoken out against the position statement:

Others have joked that they could train the AI using unconventional content or random Latin known as lorem ipsum:

It’s also been pointed out that using AI for NaNoWriMo is… kind of against the whole point of the challenge and completely counter-intuitive:

NaNoWriMo first launched in 1999, and says it saw more than 413,000 writers participate in its programmes across 2022.

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