My Thoughts on NaNoWriMo’s AI Position and Generative AI
I’ve had some trouble sleeping on and off over the last few weeks. It’s part nasty cold that has some serious hang time, part me being on my phone way too late (chocolate cake may or may not have been involved), reading about the controversy surrounding NaNoWriMo and its stance on Artificial Intelligence. Yeah... that.
If you don’t know what NaNoWriMo is, here’s the gist.
NaNoWriMo is a free online writing challenge that happens every November. Writers from all over the world join the event and attempt to write 50,000 words of a novel in 30 days.
NaNo was founded in 1999 by a group of writers on the ideals of committing to a project, allowing yourself to write badly (and fast) to get past the inner critic and get something done to celebrate creativity and connectedness!
Why November? No clue.
I’ve done it three times (maybe four, can’t recall) and won once. I haven’t been in the right spot writing-wise to draft hard and fast the last few years and my process has kind of evolved from that too, but I’ve remained a supporter.
NaNo is no stranger to controversy. Last year’s moderator/forum debacle sucked. You can read about that here. And now, this year, it’s under scrutiny (not sure if that is a strong enough word) once again, for stating it neither endorses nor opposes participants using AI and how that statement was framed.
Now, I’ll preface by saying that conflict makes me uncomfortable, really uncomfortable.
I wish everyone and everything could get along. I have always subscribed to the adage “to each their own” so long as everyone is a consenting and informed adult because “do no harm” trumps “doing your own thing.”
Honestly, I find it a bit ironic because in the books I write and love to read, change drives the story, and conflict fuels the change. But in my own life, I just wish things would stop moving so damn fast and stay the same for a second so I could catch up. In my own life, I tend to resist change, favoring comfort, ease, routine, and familiarity. So naturally, I’m a slow adopter. Just ask my husband. He teases me: “You only like change when it’s your idea, and even then, it still takes you a year to paint the wall.” This is a true statement. Paint samples adorned my otherwise blank canvas of a kitchen wall for nearly a year before I finally did something about it.
I also crave knowledge and mastery of my passions and when I commit, I COMMIT. So, I want to grow, but I also want to stay the same. I want the world to be a better place, yet I resist certain changes and desire a level of security that I realize is unattainable, and some days I’m a marshmallow and on others I can also be incredibly stubborn.
Maybe you can relate. If so, then perhaps this is the irony of our messy human existence. We are complex creatures who often want opposing things at the same time.
But anyway, I’ve digressed enough, stalled enough…back to NaNo and its recent AI statement. You might have seen the blowup on social media last month. I didn’t. Not when it first happened. It trickled to me from other sources. And I’ve been chewing on the information and what it means to me ever since.
Here’s what happened, what I know.
On 8/30/22024, NaNoWriMo released this statement on its Zendesk site:
“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 fulfill our mission by supporting the humans doing the writing. Please see this related post that speaks to our overall position on nondiscrimination with respect to approaches to creativity, writer's resources, and personal choice.
We also 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. Some brains and ability levels require outside help or accommodations to achieve certain goals. The notion that all writers “should“ be able to perform certain functions independently is a position that we disagree with wholeheartedly. There are a wealth of reasons why individuals can't "see" the issues in their writing without help.
General Access Issues. All of these considerations exist within a larger system in which writers don't always have equal access to resources along the chain. For example, underrepresented minorities are less likely to be offered traditional publishing contracts, which places some, by default, into the indie author space, which inequitably creates upfront cost burdens that authors who do not suffer from systemic discrimination may have to incur.
Beyond that, we see value in sharing resources and information about AI and any emerging technology, issue, or discussion that is relevant to the writing community as a whole. It's healthy for writers to be curious about what's new and forthcoming, and what might impact their career space or their pursuit of the craft. Our events with a connection to AI have been extremely well-attended, further-proof that this programming is serving Wrimos who want to know more.
For all of those reasons, we absolutely do not condemn AI, and we recognize and respect writers who believe that AI tools are right for them. We recognize that some members of our community stand staunchly against AI for themselves, and that's perfectly fine. As individuals, we have the freedom to make our own decisions.”
Then, on 9/24/2024, NaNoWriMo retracted the original statement (though you can find it in the archives) and released a new statement apologizing for the language they used to describe and justify their stance of neutrality (which was not so neutral to my ears).
“NaNoWriMo neither explicitly supports nor condemns any approach to writing, including the use of tools that leverage AI. We recognize that harm has been done to the writing and creative communities at the hands of bad actors in the generative AI space, and that the ethical questions and risks posed by some aspects of this technology are real. The fact that AI is a large, complex technology category (which encompasses both non-generative and generative AI, applied in a range of ways to a range of uses) contributes to our belief that AI is simply too big and too varied to categorically support or condemn.
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 fulfill our mission by supporting the humans doing the writing. Please see this related post that speaks to our overall position on nondiscrimination with respect to approaches to creativity, writer's resources, and personal choice.
We made mistakes in our initial expression of this position. We speak to those mistakes in this letter to our community, and we've simplified the language on this page to reflect our core position.”
Then they put out a letter to their community further expanding on their motives:
“Taking a position of neutrality was not an abandonment of writers’ legitimate concerns about AI. It was an acknowledgment that NaNoWriMo can’t maintain a civil, inclusive community if we allow selective intolerance. We absolutely believe that AI must be discussed and that its ethical use must be advocated-for. What we don’t believe is that NaNoWriMo belongs at the forefront of that conversation. That debate should continue to thrive within the greater writing community as technologies continue to evolve.
We apologize that our original message was unclear and seemingly random. Our note on ableism and classism was rooted in the desire to point out that, for people in certain circumstances, some forms of AI can be life-changing. We certainly don’t believe those with concerns about AI to be classist or ableist. Not being more careful about our wording was a bad decision on our part.”
Many in our writing community responded immediately and firmly to that first statement, and for others, the explanation statements and recent (10/3/2024) apology letter that followed were too little, too late.
Several well-known authors left their positions on the NaNoWriMo Writer’s Board. Ellipsis (a writing platform) pulled its sponsorship from the event. Dabble another sponsor—released strong statements of disagreement but has not pulled sponsorship as of yet. Many writers were offended by the inclusivity language and saw it as virtue signaling—dressing up NaNoWriMo’s AI position in social justice vocabulary, or worse, leveraging writers in a stereotypical fashion, to stop opposing opinions.
And me…well, I’ve been trying to wrap my head around NaNo’s position and the complexity and nuance of conflict in general because there are many angles to consider. What follows is you watching me think through this—in layers.
Contrary to what NaNoWriMo’s initial statement suggested, AI technology cannot be lumped into one bucket, nor can its use. The original statement said AI, but it wasn’t specific to what type.
To my understanding, which is admittedly limited, there is generative AI and assistive AI. Generative AI can make it for you. Assistive AI takes what you made and makes it better. A writer can use generative AI in an assistive manner.
I use Assistive AI all the time…LIKE, ALL THE TIME. Grammarly is plugged into my Docs, Gmail, Dabble, and anywhere else I write or my last sentence would have looked like pluged to odsc. Yep, I’m a letter scrambler, a word switcher/skipper and a pretty fast thinker whose mind is far too speedy for my fingers, and those two parts of me often struggle to communicate.
AI applications like Grammarly help me immensely. I use some generative AI in an assistive manner–for example, the podcast show notes and time stamps (especially the DAMN time stamps). However, I will rewrite. AI generates a summary of the interview, and I pull from that because sometimes those conversations happened months and months before they actually aired, and most often I don’t write the show notes until the week before the episode goes live. I have used generative AI for both fiction and nonfiction research, I’ve played with it to rewrite a blurb. I once asked it to write a short story about a girl and talking flowers, with no other prompts just to see what it would do and it spooked the shit out of me, in the same way when the TV comes on and no one touched the remote.
But what I won’t do is ask generative AI to create my fiction prose for me. Because I am in this to learn to be the best fiction writer I can be, and I don’t see how depending on technology in that way will help me reach that goal. That doesn’t mean I wouldn’t use ProWritingAid to help me with my glue index, show me how to activate a sentence in a better way, or use Chat-GPT to do some baseline research for fiction or nonfiction (but I believe it’s a trust but verify situation), or look at my outline to catch a plot hole. To me, those are assistive uses. That’s what’s right for me. That’s my line.
And I can’t fathom that anyone participating in NaNoWriMo would ask Chat-GPT or another Large Language Model (LLM) to write them a 50K novel about xyz just to win a competition whose only prize is self-actualization.
Why would they do that?
Okay, maybe someone out there would do it for the 50% discount on Scrivener or ProWritingAid or whatever, but it’s unethical, and that type of behavior probably speaks to bigger issues.
A writer cheating on the word count system is one argument against NaNoWriMo’s AI position–that NaNo’s “neutrality” condones that behavior.
I don’t think that’s the case. NaNo can’t police how words are generated, nor is that its focus.It’s always worked on the honor system. I mean, I could lie, and enter a false word count into NaNo’s tracker more easily than using an LLM to create a crap ton of words for me. So, why bother with AI if that’s the point? Maybe I’m being narrow-minded.
But a bad actor writing 50K words to win NaNo by unethical means is hardly the biggest issue on the table–at least to me.
More concerning is that a community that is designed to encourage people to write a novel would accept sponsorship from writing tools with generative AI capabilities and then say they are neutral about it with language that feels designed to suppress opposing opinions. I found this disingenuous and opaque.
ProWritingAid is a sponsor (has been for years) of NaNoWriMo, and ProWritingAid’s new feature, Sparks, is generative AI that goes beyond the enhancement of prose with the rephrase feature many of us are familiar with. Sparks AI could potentially continue to write your book for you.
The sponsor isn’t the issue. It’s how NaNoWriMo chose to align itself and not acknowledge the harm that generative AI has done to some writers.
What do I mean by that?
Well for me, the crux of this issue (a community who encourages us to write a novel + bad messaging + lack of transparency) comes down to the question of how do AI’s Large Language Models (LLMs) learn to do what they do when it comes to novel writing?
How did they become this entity that can spit out a novel-length piece of writing?
They had to read novels. Someone had to train it. Someone had to allow the AI model access to information so it could learn how to write a novel, how to sound like a thriller or a horror, or a romance or a coming-of-age.
I found myself asking…okay, how is an LLM reading books to learn how to generate human-like text any different than me? I read with the intention of learning to become a better fiction writer every day. But the human using the LLM in that way is skipping steps. They are missing part of the creative process, the learning for themselves part, the implementation part. The LLM does it for them—and at the expense of an author.
Reading more about how LLMs are trained was eye-opening to me.
And that’s where my issue is. The copyright stuff, which becomes an even larger matter of ethics and legality. Whose books did these generative language modules base their algorithms on? I doubt it was all open source, public-domain stuff.
Currently there is a class action lawsuit between LLM powerhouse Anthropic, which is the creator of Claude, and several authors who alleged that their written property was used to train the company’s AI model without their consent. This follows a host of other lawsuits in the US of a similar nature.
And then there is yet another angle to consider. I know some well established authors who are co-creating novels with generative AI and they have trained those models with their own books—and they have written many prior to the onset of generative AI tech. I know others who have used Claude to read their manuscripts to produce an outline of all the major events in books one and two so they could start writing book three in the series more quickly and efficiently. Those authors used their own material. Is it ethical? I think so, but I say it with hesitation. It feels like a gray area. Perhaps an established author with a bunch of books in the bank would feel more comfortable being at the forefront of the tech, and be more willing to be an early adopter. After all those books represent their own blood, sweat and tears. Maybe they see it as an exciting opportunity to make something new in a novel way. I am not there yet. Don’t know if I will ever be. Or maybe that’s my problem. Maybe I’m just worried I won’t get there and envy (and many other factors I’ve failed to consider) has me questioning their methods.
If I, as the writer I am today, were to ask generative AI to write a novel or even pieces of it at this moment in time, I would feel like I was stealing from other authors, dead or alive, copyright issue or no, open source or not. That’s not okay with me. As I learn more, write more, publish books, perhaps this view will change. Information is not static nor are all beliefs and viewpoints. Well some are, don’t murder people unless they are fictional…that is a pretty solid belief that should not change. HA!
I think the piece NaNoWriMo failed to consider when they wrote their original statement was the differentiation between the types of AI technology and that writers need to focus on ethical use and what that means for them individually and globally, not that NaNoWriMo can control how people use generative AI tech, but they can advocate for ethics, awareness, and transparency. To me they missed that boat. And leveraging social justice language when you are sponsored by generative AI tech aligned company is…dishonorable, disreputable, dis…well more of those terms.
What I wish they would have said is this: If you choose to use a form of generative AI in your creative process, please learn about how it impacts you, other writers, and the world. Please do your due diligence to understand the tool so that it’s used in an ethical manner, because right now the guardrails are shaky at best. Oh, and full disclosure, some of our sponsors use generative AI technology.
I wish they would have given some critical thinking guidelines like the Authors’ Guild did with their AI position statement. They also have this great article on AI best practices for authors.
Today I find myself feeling sad. Just sad. And going…damn it! I loved NaNoWriMo. I loved its mission, what it stood for, what it still stands for in theory: community, camaraderie, encouragement, creativity. But given last year’s fiasco (though, I understand actions have been taken to rectify that) and now this year's lack of transparent communication from the start—well my faith has been shaken. And I can’t discount, nor do I want to, the fact that NaNoWriMo has brought thousands (including me!) to the writing table over the last 25 years. It’s allowed for connection, community, expansion of creativity, possibilities, and access to learning and information in an industry where that can be an issue because of financial barriers.
So, will I NaNo in 2024?
No, I will not.
Honestly, I wasn’t going to anyway.
And I’ve decided to pause any future participation or advocacy at this time.
Sometimes relationships change, and those involved can no longer support each other anymore, and the best thing to do is take a break.
Going forward, I will think a lot more deeply about using generative AI, how I can have open conversations with the writers who work with me about using it ethically, and what it means for them and myself. I have more due diligence to do and I will continue to educate myself, share what I learn, and encourage other writers to do the same in the spirit of integrity and growth.
As much as I resist change, I cannot pretend to be an ostrich and stick my head in the sand.
As my dad says (which I’m sure he picked up elsewhere) the only thing that is inevitable is change–and damn it, does it suck the big one sometimes. Love you, Dad.
I know why I’m here: to write books I am proud of and help others write books they are proud of, too. In my opinion, writing will never be an easy job. I’m not really interested in making it “easy” because I believe that pain is necessary for growth (despite being conflict avoidant by nature…again, see a complex, messy, conflicting, human-desire-machine in action—yup that’s me).
What I am interested in is learning to do what I love better and better and better.
I’m in it for the blood, tears, and triumph.
I’m in it to give the middle finger to every voice who ever told me “You can’t be that” and “You shouldn’t do that.”
From the iconic words spat between Humperdinck and dear, sweet Wesley, in the movie The Princess Bride…“To the death!” “No! To the pain.” But also to the joy of becoming and celebrating our efforts and hard won achievements.
Will you NaNo this year? What’s your take on the situation? How do you feel about generative AI use in fiction writing?
In service and story,
Stacy
For reference, here are the statements released by NaNoWriMo about their stance on AI in their community.
Archived version of NaNoWriMo’s Original Statement on It’s AI Policy
