This is disheartening, as someone who used to do NaNoWriMo in my youth, as early as age 13, and with Chris Baty's novel No Plot? No Problem! : A low-stress, high-velocity guide to writing a novel in 30 days is still on my shelf after nearly 15 years. This is tragic.
As a teacher, I have had students with a disability accommodation (probably for dyslexia or something similar) that request through appropriate channels in student support services that I allow them to use a grammar/spell check software before submitting written assignments. Honestly, I am thrilled by these requests. Somehow, in the great big technological world we live in, students are using basic spell-checkers less and less. There is absolutely no reason why a student in a university level class should not be proof-reading their submitted work. That being said, the student support services do not have a tagline or disclaimer that says students are not to use LLMs or AI to help them write, but a separate student handbook states that anything not produced by the student (thus providing an umbrella for AI, sketchy essay-writers-for-hire, or a generous older sibling) is plagiarism.
AI grammar tools with narrative or plot structure suggestions really blur this line, and the point of learning a skill is, well, learning it. My fear is that AI permissions like what NaNoWriMo is suggesting will produce a generation (or more) of "writers" who can't write, and would rather go through the efforts to have have an LLM do the entire assignment than press a single button to correct a misspelled word or two. We would like to think that people who cheat, in any sense of the word, will get their comeuppance, but equally as many people get away with it long enough to step over people who do the same work by actually working hard.
I am wondering for a moment, how the monastic and secular scribes of the 16th century felt when Gutenberg's printing press came out. History makes me sympathetic, but it seems Capitalism wins again.
*Disclaimer: any spelling or grammar mistakes in this post should be ruled as crimes of passion, inflicted in the heat of the moment.
As a teacher, I have had students with a disability accommodation (probably for dyslexia or something similar) that request through appropriate channels in student support services that I allow them to use a grammar/spell check software before submitting written assignments. Honestly, I am thrilled by these requests. Somehow, in the great big technological world we live in, students are using basic spell-checkers less and less. There is absolutely no reason why a student in a university level class should not be proof-reading their submitted work. That being said, the student support services do not have a tagline or disclaimer that says students are not to use LLMs or AI to help them write, but a separate student handbook states that anything not produced by the student (thus providing an umbrella for AI, sketchy essay-writers-for-hire, or a generous older sibling) is plagiarism.
AI grammar tools with narrative or plot structure suggestions really blur this line, and the point of learning a skill is, well, learning it. My fear is that AI permissions like what NaNoWriMo is suggesting will produce a generation (or more) of "writers" who can't write, and would rather go through the efforts to have have an LLM do the entire assignment than press a single button to correct a misspelled word or two. We would like to think that people who cheat, in any sense of the word, will get their comeuppance, but equally as many people get away with it long enough to step over people who do the same work by actually working hard.
I am wondering for a moment, how the monastic and secular scribes of the 16th century felt when Gutenberg's printing press came out. History makes me sympathetic, but it seems Capitalism wins again.
*Disclaimer: any spelling or grammar mistakes in this post should be ruled as crimes of passion, inflicted in the heat of the moment.