No More NaNoWriMo

Who knew I could get so angry so fast?

It is with great sorrow but even greater fury that I have submitted my resignation from the NaNoWriMo Authors Board this morning.

Why? Because they’ve come out with an absolutely insupportable position on “Generative AI.”

(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.)

Screencaps in case they scrub the site:

(And before anyone asks, "Well after last year how could you be surprised?", I had and honestly still have only the blurriest of ideas of what happened last year as I was in the middle of a personal crisis at the time it unfolded. No, I am not asking for anyone to fill me in now; one catastrophe at a time is quite enough to be getting on with.)

It breaks my heart to do this. I have been doing NaNoWriMo since 2001, when I was a junior in high school. There has never been a year since where I did not attempt either the classic November or a Camp Nano, and in many years, I did both. From Unseen Fire was a NaNo success story. It began life as my 2011 NaNo project, and I was previously proud to say so. I was absolutely delighted when I was asked to join their Authors Board. I have championed NaNo for actual decades at this point. I have written for their blogs and social media. I’ve taught workshops to high school students and library-goers. On this very blog, I’ve shared my joy of NaNo, posting prompts and pep talks. It’s been a long time since I needed NaNo to push me to write words, but I still loved being part of the excitement and community every November.

NaNoWriMo has meant so much to me over the years. But this position they’ve taken is infuriating and insulting.

Let’s break it down, shall we?

• 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.

• Condemning AI is not ableist or classist. This is such an insulting implication that I hardly know what to say. Generative AI is not a tool to help those with physical or mental disabilities write. I know this because I have listened to my friends with physical and mental diabilities say so (and I have already this morning seen several of them furious that NaNoWriMo would use them in this way). I also know this because Generative AI cannot write. It can arrange words into a sentence, but it cannot write, because it cannot think, reason, or imagine.

• Generative AI does not help people find their voices. It robs them of that opportunity. You cannot find your voice by having a machine do the work for you. You cannot outsource your own voice. This was the core of the anti-plagiarism speech I used to give students: Why silence yourself by letting someone else’s voice stand for your own?

• Generative AI will not make anyone a better writer. You learn to be a better writer by doing the work. That will never happen if you’re plagiarizing, no matter what shiny tool you’re using to go about that plagiarism. Like any skill, if you want to be good, you have to practice.

• Getting feedback does not require paying someone. I mean, this is just a wild thing coming from an organization whose whole basis seemed to be connecting writers with each other. Critique groups are a thing! Both in-person and online! There are absolutely free ways to have human help you improve your writing. Heck, I’ve always said I learned so much of what I know from coming up through the fanfic trenches, precisely because that’s a place you can get feedback! There are also bajillions of free resources out there. So many authors put advice, tips & tricks, behind-the-scenes stuff on their websites and blogs, totally for free. If you can access ChatGPT, you can access all of that. The argument NaNoWriMo puts forth on this is so thoroughly disingenuous (but of a piece with the fact that NaNo has apparently been pushing lots of pay-to-play writing scams lately? Which is something else I’d missed the scandal over) — and it feels, as so many things with Generative AI do, as though it’s the solution in search of a problem.

• Creative writing has value even if it’s unpublished. That statement from NaNoWriMo makes it seem like this work is only worth doing if you’re going to get a publishing contract out of it someday. It isn’t. That’s a fine goal to have—as I obviously did!—but it’s not the only reason to write. It doesn’t have to be everyone’s goal, or even a published author’s goal for ever project. I would still write even if I weren’t ever going to publish again, because writing is about human creativity and expression. I always thought NaNo was about the joy of creation, not its ultimate monetization.

• Generative AI does not address issues of inequity within publishing. There are a lot of barriers to getting published, if that is your goal, and moreso if you are a member of a marginalized community. This is not an answer to any of them. It’s pretty insulting to imply that the only way members of marginalized communities can get their foot in the door is through the use of a plagiarism machine.

• Generative AI is antithetical to creativity. This is what underpins all the rest, really. And I’ve written about this before, so I’m not going to reiterate that all here, but it’s just unutterably depressing to have an organization that I thought was all about the joy of unfettered creativity decide that, no, it’s actually all about the churn of pointless, heartless, regurgitated dribble.

And on top of all of that, Generative AI is an ecological disaster, and it’s turning out to be a financial one, too. I’ve read a lot of people who are smarter about both tech and economics than I am saying that this bubble is likely to burst within the next year, so NaNoWriMo is torching whatever remained of its reputation for… what, exactly?

I don’t know what’s happened to this organization. It sounds like a lot of the worst parts of nonprofits, really, but that horrific statement also makes me wonder if they’ve got a big TechBro investor pushing them in a certain direction.

I am angry. I am hurt. And I am so, so disappointed.

ETA (~8pm, 2 Sept): I received a response from NaNo’s Interim Executive Director. It was, broadly, polite, but also defensive. It leaned heavily into the excuse many folks predicted would be their smokescreen: “oh we just meant other types of AI, people are misquoting and taking things out of context!”

Except.

That message was followed up with this:

So what, then, is the “certain way of writing” they don’t want to risk delegitimizing, in the middle of a conversation about Generative AI?

As for the separate post mentioned, it strikes me as curious that it was posted at, as best I can tell, roughly the same time as their AI position, which says to me that they knew there would be consequences and had a CYA already prepped and ready to go.

They do this without *directly* mentioning Generative AI, of course. But the thing about being a reader and a writer? Is you get pretty good at finding the relationship between plot points.

The second post is every bit as disingenuous as the other post, effectively equating the shame (rightfully) cast at AI “authors” with the stigma faced by romance, indie, and fanfic authors. Y’know. People who work at their craft.

I have no intention of entering a back-and-forth with the Interim ED. There are far better things I can do with my time — like, for example, working on writing a book! So long as they do remove my name from the website, I consider the matter closed. But I am grievously disappointed. I don’t know what’s happened to this organization in recent years, but it’s of a piece with the enshittification of so many platforms and gathering spaces. And that’s sad.