NaNoWriMo goes pro-LLMs

[Jubal]

So this happened:
https://nanowrimo.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/29933455931412-What-is-NaNoWriMo-s-position-on-Artificial-Intelligence-AI

And it's pretty miserable honestly. They're arguing that banning AI would be ablist and classist which Sure Is A Hell Of A Take. Especially claiming it's classist, given that AI works by hoovering up the work of large numbers of not-elite creators to be juice for technologies owned by the top end of society's elites. Their argument that it creates accessibility equally feels crap, because the main publishing costs that can be reduced by AI use are things like cover art, which ends up being "making things accessible" to indie writers by taking work away from indie artists.

Then there's the ableism bit. Now, I think that one of the more valid uses for AI (though I'm jury out on whether it's worth the heavy costs of development) is accessibility: producing rough summaries and text transcriptions or loose frameworks in a case where you're then going to edit and fill them out, or for producing written descriptions of images for blind folks if nobody else has bothered to do it. That said, that's not what NaNoWriMo are doing here - they're making it pretty clear that they're blanket OK with AI writing, which means AI for core text production and plot-writing is in there too. That is not something AI is good at, and claiming disabled folks can't do it feels really infantilising.

And there's just... no recognition of the criticism? At all? Which feels weird, it really feels like a counterattack post rather than a "we've weighed all this up, we hear you, but here's our position" which makes it come across SO much worse.


EDIT: Got sent this link which suggest that this is inevitable money talking: an AI-assist writing tool called ProWritingAid is this year's major sponsor. https://pivot-to-ai.com/2024/09/02/nanowrimo-gets-ai-sponsor-says-not-writing-your-novel-with-ai-is-classist-and-ableist/


My one plus side from this is that I'm probably finally not going to feel bad about not doing NaNoWriMo this year, because I actively don't want to support a project that's going to be this amoral about how it operates.

[Eadgifu the Fair]

Oh dear oh dear oh dear. Offending your writers to the point they leave in droves because you wanted that sweet sweet AI sponsorship money seems like a poor financial decision in the long term, given what I understand is the likelihood that the AI bubble will, at some point, burst...

Also, the most frequent NaNoWriMo participant I know is disabled in multiple ways and would be deeply disturbed by the implication they could use, or ought to use, AI to compensate. If we're talking about disabled and working-class writers, I want to hear their words, not the words a plagiarism machine has come up with for them. The implication that their own words wouldn't be worth hearing is an ugly one.

[Jubal]

If we're talking about disabled and working-class writers, I want to hear their words, not the words a plagiarism machine has come up with for them. The implication that their own words wouldn't be worth hearing is an ugly one.

Yeah, this is a much neater summary of the issues than my brain had managed to produce!

[dubsartur]

Freelance writing, editing, and art are very important niches for people who can't fit into a corporate job due to physical disability or neurodivergence.  So the promotion of these technologies is a direct attack on people with few other good options.

OTOH, I like their warning that "AI" is a very broad and vague label (many search engines probably used related technologies before 2022).  An old saying is that AI is whatever computers can't do yet, because when we teach computers to play chess their way of doing so seems anticlimactic.

[Jubal]

OTOH, I like their warning that "AI" is a very broad and vague label (many search engines probably used related technologies before 2022).  An old saying is that AI is whatever computers can't do yet, because when we teach computers to play chess their way of doing so seems anticlimactic.

Yeah, I think this is a very good argument for being careful and specific when phrasing and framing rules around this stuff (and why I try to refer to e.g. LLMs rather than AI for example: we did similar careful phrasing when working on the Exilian rules around this stuff). But I think part of the business of writing rules has to be finding phrasing that accurately captures what people's problems and concerns are, rather than just saying one can't address those concerns because the people advocating for change didn't use exact enough words themselves.

And yeah, I think editors and proofreadors are some of the sorts of people who get especially screwed over by LLMs claiming to be able to do their job badly (and indeed I think it's that sort of editing/critique that NaNo's sponsor ProWritingAid promises with its "AI extensions", according to someone on the Fediverse who has a lifetime copy of the package from before it added LLM content).

[dubsartur]

Also, part of the point of NaNoWriMo is to train yourself to write fast (because that really helps for making money or building an audience) and LLMs can short-circuit that at the cost of creating bland prose with vague plots that needs a great deal of editing.  So using a LLM to write can defeat the purpose of NaNoWriMo. 

I think there are people who use LLMs to create a 'crappy first draft' but I'm not sure how well that would work for creative writing.

[TheLichQueen]

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.

[Rob_Haines]

As I said on Mastodon regarding this issue, the answer to "there aren't enough non-English speaking/disabled/working class voices being published" cannot be "here's a tool that fundamentally reshapes marginalised voices into the statistical mean voice of those already published"

The lack of wider diversity of voices being published can't be reduced to "but if we make those voices indistinguishable from the mainstream, they too can be accepted" without losing the point.

[Jubal]

Some updates:

NaNo sponsor Ellipsus has pulled out of sponsoring them:
https://ellipsus.com/blog/nanowrimo-sponsorship-generative-ai

And according to this Washington Post article,
"We fundamentally disagree with the sentiment that criticism of AI tools is inherently ableist or classist. We believe that writers' concerns about the role of AI are valid and deserve thoughtful consideration"