I'm Probably Really Late To The Party, But It's Only Just Occurred To Me That NaNoWriMo Trying To Defend

I'm probably really late to the party, but it's only just occurred to me that NaNoWriMo trying to defend the use of AI in writing because 'anti-AI stances are ableist' is just.

honestly.

the most ironic thing ever.

NaNoWriMo is and has always been ableist, just as a baseline concept. as a disabled person I have never been able to participate in NaNoWriMo and I will never be able to participate in NaNoWriMo.

my multiple disabilities and chronic illnesses prevent me from writing a novel in a month. it is just literally not physically possible for me. the one time I really tried, complete with multiple disability aids and a plan for pacing myself through the month and six weeks of prepping my physical health before November 1st, do you know what happened?

I had a chronic illness crash on November 3rd. literally three days into my plan to pace myself through NaNoWriMo. I didn't recover until roughly Christmas or New Years. I've never bothered to try again because of how badly I crashed. but it did teach me that I should never try to stick to schedules and deadlines made with able-bodied people in mind. a harsh lesson but one I needed to learn.

and asking ChatGPT to write my novel idea for me would not solve that problem. it would not result in a novel that I had written. it would not result in prose that sounds like me, that communicates the emotion behind the novel idea in a way that allows someone else to slip into my (chronically ill) shoes. it might be enough words to technically qualify as a novel, but it would not be my novel.

and to imply otherwise is to erase the lived experience of actual disabled people, while trying to cover up the inherent ableism of your 'write a whole-ass fucking novel in a single fucking month' event by calling people who value the art of writing ableist for opposing AI.

so many of the "i only use chat gpt for ___" excuses are concerning because people use it in place of learning basic, valuable skills.

you don't need chat gpt to write professional sounding emails for you, there are many many guides on the internet and with a bit of practise you can learn to write them yourself. a very important skill for a professional to have, and some of the basic rules will carry over into irl conversations!

you don't need chat gpt to be a "more detailed search engine", because you're robbing yourself of the chance to learn how to find and filter information on the internet and evaluate the credibility of sources. which is a VITAL skill. plus, chat gpt is notorious for being wrong?

if you use it to write essays, you're taking away your ability to hone your research skills, your writing skills, your critical thinking skills. your ability to create persuasive arguments!

and for most of the other reasons people use chat gpt, there are non-ai websites for that! for maths, wolfram alpha. for figuring out what you can cook with the ingredients you have there's supercook and the like. for creating routines, there's about a million apps!

whatever you "only" use chatgpt for i promise there are better websites out there that you don't have to worry will produce complete bullshit???? and destroy the environment???

AO3 Comments are SO SO SOOOOOOO important because you can only leave Kudos ONCE. You add to the hit count ONCE (every 24 hours).

So whenever someone updates their fic, the ONLY way an author knows who their regular readers are is if they comment on each chapter. And we WANT to know who's still reading.

Believe it or not, some of us think about the name that pops up constantly in the comments and go "omg I can't wait to see what they think of THIS SPECIFIC SCENE cuz I KNOW they'll say something about it!!!"

not even JRR Tolkien, who famously developed the concept of the Secondary World and firmly believed that no trace of the Real World should be evoked in the fictional world, was able to remove potatoes from his literature. this is a man who developed whole languages and mythologies for his literary world, who justified its existence in English as a translation* simply because he was so miffed he couldn't get away with making the story fully alien to the real world. and not even he, in extremis, was so cruel as to deny his characters the heavenly potato. could not even conceive a universe devoid of the potato. such is its impact. everyone please take a moment to say thank you to South Americans for developing and cultivating one of earth's finest vegetables. the potato IS all that. literally world-changing food. bless.

Random linguistic worldbuilding: A language with six sets of pronouns, which are set by one's current state of existence. There's a separate pronoun for people who are alive, people who are dead, and potential future people who are yet to be born, and the ambiguous ones of "may or may not be alive or aleady dead", "may or may not have even been born yet", and the ultimate general/ambiguous all-covering one that covers all ambiguous states.

The culture has a specific defined term for that tragic span of time when a widow keeps accidentally referring to their spouse with living pronouns. New parents-to-be dropping the happy surprise news of a pregnancy by referring to their future child with the "is yet to be born" pronoun instead of a more ambiguous one and waiting for the "wait what did you just say?" reactions.

Someone jokingly referring to themselves with the dead person pronouns just to highlight how horrible their current hangover is. A notorious aspiring ladies' man who keeps trying to pursue women in their 20s despite of approaching middle age fails to notice the insult when someone asks him when he's planning to get married, and uses the pronoun that implies that his ideal future bride may not even be born yet.

A mother whose young adult child just moved away from home for the first time, who continues to dramatically refer to their child with "may or may not be already dead" until the aforementioned child replies to her on facebook like "ma stop telling people I'm dead" and having her respond with "well how could I possibly know that when you don't even write to us? >:,C"

"This fic was ai generated—" Cool, so lemme block you real quick