Like a lot of writers on social media this week, I’ve seen the eruption of reaction to Nanowrimo not coming out in favor of generative AI, but also going so far as to call it “classist” and “ableist” to critique use of it in writing.

I’ve seen a whole hell of a lot of reactions to this. At least one writer I directly follow on Mastodon, Lilith Saint-Crow, was so furious about this that she actively resigned from Nanowrimo’s author board. And I’ve seen multiple members of the disabled community incensed that Nanowrimo is trying to speak for them.

And gosh who could possibly have foreseen that Nanowrimo now has a sponsor that sells an AI tool? That couldn’t possibly have motivated their stance on the matter, could it?

(Narrator: It absolutely motivated their stance on the matter.)

Me, I’m on record already as not being a fan of generative AI at all. I hate that it’s turned the Internet at large into even more of a cesspool than it already was. It’s made a laughingstock of search engines. It’s gotten so many big names in tech so desperate to latch onto it that they’re trying to shoehorn “AI” into every possible place they can shoehorn it, without any particular thought as to whether it would actually be useful.

I’m pretty damned sure its rise has contributed to how I’m now in the throes of the longest span of unemployment I’ve ever had in my entire career as a software tester. Not only in terms of how long I’ve been out of a job, but also in how the entire process has become so much more automated and impersonal.

It’s made it all the more fucking difficult for actual living, breathing authors to get their work noticed. Multiple SF/F publishers have talked about over the last many months how their slush piles have gotten overrun with AI submissions. And don’t even get me started on how AI-generated crap masquerading as ebooks has swamped Amazon. I wasn’t selling all that many ebooks to begin with, and now? I’m going months on end without a single sale.

I hate that artists and musicians are in the same boat, too.

And I hate that this mass deployment of a plagiarism machine all over the tech industry is yet another assault on the climate, as if we didn’t have enough reasons why the planet is on fire.

For the record? I’m on Team No Goddammit You Don’t Need AI to Write.

“But it’s haaaaaard,” you might be saying. Yes. Writing is hard. Making any kind of art is hard, whether it’s words, music, paintings, digital art, photography, sculpture, whatever it is that you want to try to do. Learning how to do it, and do it right, is all part of the process. You’re shortchanging yourself if you just fire up ChatGPT (or whatever LLM you feel like talking to) and go, “Write my story for me!”

“But I suck at it!” Yeah, and? I got news: every single writer that ever put pen to paper or fingers to keyboard sucked at it at first. It takes practice, and it takes work, to get good at it. You need to develop your own sense of how to build a plot, how to create a believable cast of characters, and how to know when to use tropes and when to upend them.

Most of all, you need to develop a sense of how to put words into an order that’s not only coherent, but also a pleasure for readers to read. You need to develop your own voice and your own command of prose.

None of which you will ever do if you rely on an LLM to do it for you.

And also, I mean seriously, do you really want to entrust your prose output to technology that’s on record as advising Google users to eat rocks and put glue on their pizzas?

That technology?

What in the name of all that’s holy makes you think that this is a technology that will do anything but spit out complete and utter bullshit word salad, when you ask it to help you write a novel?

So yeah. Nanowrimo making this announcement did not go over well with me at all. And their sneering about it being “classist” and “ableist” to critique use of AI as a writing tool was just the icing on the cake.

I have, accordingly, deleted my account off the Nanowrimo site. Not that they’ll care, or that this will have any real meaningful impact on my life anyway–I haven’t done a Nanowrimo in years, after all, despite periodic attempts to try it again. But still, I’m disheartened by it as well as mad. It’s yet another example of enshittification destroying something that was previously awesome. And which previously did mean something to me personally–because after all, Faerie Blood was born during the Nanowrimo of 2003.

And it was only after I’d already deleted my account off their site that I also found references to last year’s Nanowrimo scandal going around–which I’d somehow managed to miss entirely. That had to do with accusations of child grooming happening on their forums, and holy shit yikes. That just underscored how my removal of my account was the right thing to do.

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Here’s a sample of links about the situation that I’ve seen come across my feeds:

From Ars Technica: NaNoWriMo faces backlash over AI stance emphasizing “classist and ableist issues”

From the author Cass Morris: No More NaNoWriMo

From The Kesblog: NaNoWri-NO

From Aftermath: You Don’t Need AI To Write A Novel

Forum thread discussing the matter on Literature and Latte, the site for Scrivener, the writing app I and a lot of other writers use (and which is a known sponsor of Nanowrimo, for that matter): NaNoWriMo 2024 AI statement

Google Docs summary of the 2023 Nanowrimo controversy: NaNoWriMo 2023 controversy summary

And last but not least, there is already an attempt in progress to whip up a Nanowrimo replacement, Writing Month, so those of you out there interested in such a thing may wish to monitor that site’s progress: Writing Month is coming soon

Editing to add: From author Chuck Wendig, spotted after I put up this post: Generative AI Is Not Free