Boy howdy, National Novel Writing Month

Or: Let the computer write your novel

The organization National Novel Writing Month, an organization that has been around since 1999, encourages people to devote the month of November to write a novel. This year, the organization announced that it would not object tof submissions aided by AI.

And, as Wired says, all hell broke loose.

NaNoWriMo has always encouraged a goofy kind of approach to writing a novel. Participants devote the month of November to getting words on a page, and voila! In December? They’re authors. Of course it’s not quite that easy, but I’ve participated on the off year and I definitely got words on a page, though the products never really actually resembled actual novels. I appreciated the discipline, though.

The Verge said the organization was in “disarray” after the announcement. I don’t know if this hyperbole, but the reaction has been pretty quick and fairly angry.

Writers who’ve been involved in the effort have stepped away, including fantasy writer Cass Morris, who picked apart NaNoWriMo’s reasons for AI on her blog:

Generative AI as it currently exists is entirely unethical. Full stop. This should be the end of any and all conversations when it comes to Generative AI, frankly. These LLMs only exist because they stole data, and by data, I mean the work of authors. They trained their machines on our books without our consent or any compensation. (And yes, “our”, my books were found in at least one of the datasets). They scraped them from pirate sites (so compounding evil upon evil there), and then, when called out on it, have said, “Well, but if we couldn’t commit this crime, our business couldn’t exist.” Sounds like your business shouldn’t exist, then! And now NaNoWriMo is taking the side of the techbros who have harmed the very authors it claims to support.

Please go to the link above as anything I say will just be parroting Morris. She did a more-than-capable job expressing why AI has no place in this kind of creative process.

I would know these things. I’ve become a master at spotting AI-created work in college assignments. Using AI to complete an assignment that calls for creativity is akin to hiring someone else to mow your yard.

And let me tell you just how awful are journalism stories generated by a machine, and yet, here we are.

Morris is not alone.

I’m with Morris and Older et al. We have, once again, let our excitement about technology outstrip our ethics. Simply because we have the capability to do something (in this case, have a machine create a story) is no reason we need to use that capability. I know there are good and decent uses for artificial intelligence, but this isn’t it.

So though it’s only a drop in a very large bucket, I, too, shall skip NaNoWriMo until someone in authority says no to AI. We can all marvel at the capabilities of AI, but nah. Big time, nah.