NaNoWriMo Shits The Bed On Artificial Intelligence

So, NaNoWriMo — the organization behind the official implementation of the challenge of National Novel Writing Month — has come out firmly on the side of generative AI. Further, they’ve gone and suggested that condemning generative AI is classist, ableist, and privileged.

I’ll keep this as short and sweet as I can —

The privileged viewpoint is the viewpoint in favor of generative AI. The intrusion of generative artificial intelligence into art and writing suits one group and one group only: the fucking tech companies that invented this pernicious, insidious shit. They very much want you to relinquish your power in creating art and telling stories to them and their software, none of which are essential or even useful in the process of telling stories or making art but that they really, really want you to believe are essential. It’s a lie, a scam, a con. Generative AI empowers not the artist, not the writer, but the tech industry. It steals content to remake content, graverobbing existing material to staple together its Frankensteinian idea of art and story. And in stealing the material, by making that theft and regurgitation easy and effortless — so easy and so effortless that the essential human component of creation is extracted entirely from the process! — it limits the quality and value of art, watering it all down and turning it all to a soylent slurry. A valueless soylent slurry, which means, conveniently, that companies can pay little to nothing for art and content going forward because they can either just hit a button to have it shit out its gross recombination of stolen material, or, realizing that the stolen material is garbage, they can just say, “Well, we’ll pay you less, because otherwise we’ll just hit this stupid button for free.” The privilege here is on the tech companies and on NaNoWriMo. Art is for humans. Story is for humans. They are its makers, they are its witnesses.

You can be sure if you give NaNoWriMo any of your material, they are going to be feeding it to the artbarf robots to become just more shitty artbarf.

Let them push buttons and have robots tell stories to feed to other robots.

We humans can all stay far the fuck away from it. We can gather around the campfire and tell our stories to each other. True no matter who we are. Though the industry is often unfair (and classist, and ableist, and privileged) the act of telling stories is universal, and has existed as long as we have. (I’m sure Homer would have something to say about all this.)

(Er, the ancient Greek, not the cartoon doofus.)

Anyway.

If you want some good news, it’s that NaNoWriMo and generative AI have one very important thing in common:

You don’t need either of them to tell a good story.