Statement clearly written by AI
yeah, same vibe as hate reading the jakob nielsen substack
That’s it. the world needs a different name for writing a novel in november without all the trademarks and baggage of NaNoWriMo.
I propose “November”. It is a portmanteau of “Novel” and “November”.
NaNoWriMo did not say that ‘not writing your novel with AI is classist and ableist’.
What they did say however is almost worse:
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.
So you’re classist and ableist and probably privileged if you’re against the use of AI.
Nah this is still a stupid point.
LLMs are not a writing tool at all, it’s like saying it’s classist to not be able to afford a ghostwriter.
The audacity to tout classism and ableism as reasons as to why people should “get to” use LLMs for their “write a novel in a month” challenge…
Even when someone’s inability to write a novel in a month is because of their class or disability, I somehow doubt they want to let a machine write their novel for them. I mean, it’s not like NaNoWriMo is a way to put food on the table or something, right?!!
This feels like the arguments Mid journey
fellatorsfanboys were spouting a year ago (or has it been two?) on how not everyone can afford a school of fine arts 🙄A statement by one of the authors who has resigned from the NaNoWriMo board: No More NaNoWriMo, by Cass Morris.
“Well, but if we couldn’t commit this crime, our business couldn’t exist.” Sounds like your business shouldn’t exist, then.
so refreshing to see that from elsewhere too. same stance I hold about so much of the awful shit in the world (including an internet primarily financed through surveillance advertising), and it’d be great if more people bought in
although with how many businesses are speedrunning dumb choices (like the alexa thing etc), maybe that day comes sooner than not
Their starting aside is pretty great as well;
And I’m using that term throughout this post because it’s the commonly accepted descriptor, but we all know it’s not really artificial intelligence, right? I also want to distinguish it from actually-useful and ethically-produced technology like what gets used in the medical field to help humans examine and analyze impossibly huge datasets in the service of doing things like curing cancer. We’re talking here about the plagiarism machines like ChatGPT, everything it underpins, and all of its conceptual mirrors.
Leave no wiggle room for the AI sycophants.
So it’s called the National Novel Writing Month, but like what nation? Should non-US writers have their own ones?
Also I just saw they have a logo and it’s an insult to heraldry.
Novel Novel November (or, NovNovNov)
Novel (as in new) Novel (as in book)
The term I’ve been using.
This term is hereby gifted to the Fediverse in full libre with copyleft methodologies, and is proposed as a replacement for the term NaNoWriMo for the November novel writing movement.
I joined a writing meetup here in Amsterdam which gathers every week in a bar to write, to talk about their writing, to bounce ideas, etc. I kinda got tired of going because there were a worrying number of people using chatgpt to generate ideas. I was the only one trying to write non-fiction, and most of what I was writing would be crit of tech (sometimes genAI) so talking about my writing was always fun. But nonetheless, their use of chatgpt seemed extra weird because we were there, together, to write and support each other, for free.
It’s strange to use solidarity, support, and just general helpfulness from others as an explanation for how AI opens writing up to classes or abilities when that’s probably one of the top things that social media (and pre-social media social media) gave us on the internet.
anyway…
NaNoPromptMo
Also I’d hate to see Scrivener touch AI - esp because they sponsor nanowrimo and still seem connected https://web.archive.org/web/20240902130810/https://www.literatureandlatte.com/nanowrimo
Scrivener is a hero product in my research/writing as an example of a software product that is designed for concrete purpose
A while back one of their reps did say somewhere on Reddit that they have no intention of adding any LLM features to Scrivener. Granted, they said that in the context of moving towards a subscription model and talking about features that don’t work with their current business model, but still. Unless something has changed recently, they seem to want to stick to being a one-time purchase without any cloud-based services whatsoever, including AI, for their next major version too.
I hope so. I know the founder designed it and then learned how to code to build it himself. Hopefully he’s still running the show and he’s a good one
fyi they updated their blog post with this catch-all disclaimer in the last couple of hours
“it is simply too big to categorically endorse or not endorse”
“so we’re gonna play it safe and endorse it”
categorical
situational
Alright then, point out the situations where there are good actors in the AI space. Oh, there are none? that would imply that materially the whole category is corrupt.
so I clicked through to the barely veiled advertisement on NaNoWriMo’s blog:
Rephrase by ProWritingAid is a brand-new feature meant for writers like you. You can highlight any sentence, click Rephrase, and generate a new sentence. Shorten or lengthen a sentence, change the tone to formal or informal, or add sensory detail.
Here’s a boring sentence I wrote: “Quinn entered the dark and cold forest.”
And here’s a sentence Rephrase gave me: “Quinn shivered as he stepped into the cold, dark forest, the air thick with the scent of damp earth.”
I can build off that! Now I’m more excited to write this scene that was feeling bland.
like fuck me that’s somehow even more bland, but it’s longer so you’re closer to that 50,000 words you need to write
so you can nutI’m not a particularly good writer, but here’s some advice my human brain hallucinated without burning down a rainforest:
- nobody fucking “steps into” a forest, what the fuck is that? if it’s an important place, describe it geographically. describe how the atmosphere and scenery change as Quinn approaches the forest. and since this is NaNoWriMo and you’re in a hurry, you can go with a placeholder like
// TODO: sober up and do some basic research on what forests and their surrounding areas are usually like for authenticity, lorem ipsum Deloris shrdlu - this fucker started shivering? is he naked? is the forest frozen in a way the surrounding area isn’t? if so maybe write that cause it sounds more interesting than this bland shit.
- maybe I live in a particularly dry place, but my brain isn’t rendering “the scent of damp earth” or why it’d sit thick in the air. I don’t think that’s what the forests I’ve been in smell like though — they smell like trees looking to fuck. but is Quinn the type of character who’d even give a fuck about any of this? maybe he lives in the forest and none of these smells are new. maybe he’s currently half a foot tall so the smell of the damp earth’s very relevant to him. the LLM doesn’t know so it filled in the blandest shit possible instead!
- nobody fucking “steps into” a forest, what the fuck is that? if it’s an important place, describe it geographically. describe how the atmosphere and scenery change as Quinn approaches the forest. and since this is NaNoWriMo and you’re in a hurry, you can go with a placeholder like
