The FAQ's Say It All...

The FAQ's Say it All...

So for how Nanowrimo is going, a story can be inferred from the FAQ page

NaNoWriMo official statement: We 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.

Translation: Disabled people and poor people can't write and they need the Theft Machines to actually be good writers, and disagreeing with us is means you're a fundamentally bad person.

Meanwhile, Ted Chiang: "Believing that inspiration outweighs everything else is, I suspect, a sign that someone is unfamiliar with the medium."

"Many novelists have had the experience of being approached by someone convinced that they have a great idea for a novel, which they are willing to share in exchange for a fifty-fifty split of the proceeds. Such a person inadvertently reveals that they think formulating sentences is a nuisance rather than a fundamental part of storytelling in prose. Generative A.I. appeals to people who think they can express themselves in a medium without actually working in that medium. But the creators of traditional novels, paintings, and films are drawn to those art forms because they see the unique expressive potential that each medium affords. It is their eagerness to take full advantage of those potentialities that makes their work satisfying, whether as entertainment or as art."

"The programmer Simon Willison has described the training for large language models as “money laundering for copyrighted data,” which I find a useful way to think about the appeal of generative-A.I. programs: they let you engage in something like plagiarism, but there’s no guilt associated with it because it’s not clear even to you that you’re copying."

"Is the world better off with more documents that have had minimal effort expended on them? ... Can anyone seriously argue that this is an improvement?"

"The task that generative A.I. has been most successful at is lowering our expectations, both of the things we read and of ourselves when we write anything for others to read. It is a fundamentally dehumanizing technology because it treats us as less than what we are: creators and apprehenders of meaning. It reduces the amount of intention in the world."

-----------

I'm with Ted on this one. What the actual fuck, NaNoWriMo? Makes me wonder what the purpose behind the 'doublecheck your wordcount' box has been used for all these years, if not stealing for the Theft Machines.

Sources:

NaNo's original statement

NaNo's attempt at backtracking

Ted Chiang's New Yorker article (paywalled, but i hit refresh until it gave up)

Techcrunch article

Help Wanted

Hello hello and welcome to this week’s six sentence story based on the word FOIL. I have no idea where this one came from, but follow our narrator Quinn as she attends an interview, where things might be a little bit off… Quinn kept a polite smile on her face as she answered each question in the interview, never quite relaxing even as it became apparent that she was acing it. She knew it didn’t…

imo the best way to interpret those “real people don’t do x” writing advice posts is “most people don’t do x, so if a character does x, it should be a distinguishing trait.” human behavior is infinitely varied; for any x, there are real people who do x. we can’t make absolute statements. we can, however, make probabilistic ones.

for example, most people don’t address each other by name in the middle of a casual conversation. if all your characters do that, your dialogue will sound stilted and unnatural. but if just one character does that, then it tells us something about that character.

this suuuuuuuuuuuuuuucks. fuck nanowrimo. if you're doing NaNoWriMo this year, let them know how much this sucks and don't give them any of your money.

National Novel Writing Month

What is NaNoWriMo's position on Artificial Intelligence (AI)?

NaNoWriMo does not explicitly support any specific approach to writing, nor does it explicitly condemn any approach, including the use of AI

generative AI is not a classism issue it is not an ableism issue tHE WHOLE GOAL OF THE PROJECT IS THAT YOU ARE WRITING AND NOT AN ALGORITHM.