145: NaNoWriMo + AI

 

NaNoWriMo is an annual challenge to write 50k words in the month of November. I was planning to discuss pros and cons of participating in the challenge, but I recently came across NaNoWriMo's position on AI, which I found really troubling. We chat about all of the above in this episode. 

NaNoWriMo's statement: https://nanowrimo.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/29933455931412-What-is-NaNoWriMo-s-position-on-Artificial-Intelligence-AI

-----

- Click here for ways to work with me + a free character profile template: www.thekatiewolf.com/info

- The last Tuesday of the month is a Q&A episode! Submit your questions for me HERE.


- TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@katiewolfwrites

- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/katiewolfwrites

 

 

NaNoWriMo + AI

Hi friends, welcome to your big creative life podcast. I am back from four days in the North Carolina mountains. I went with Sam and Audrey to spend a few days with his family. He has two siblings, so we met his siblings, his parents and all his siblings have kids as well. And so it was just like a big reunion in the mountains. And it was so fun. It was so hot. We were all excited for like, cool weather, and it was just as hot as it has been in Charleston, but we got back two nights or two days ago, and we came home to our AC being out. So it is currently absurdly hot in the house. It's like hotter in the hot in the house, and it is outside.

 

So I'm at a co working space today, and we've been making it work. But yesterday was Labor Day, so we, we didn't have a chance. The repair person couldn't come out, but they're gonna try to come out today, and I haven't heard from Sam yet if they did, but I'm hoping they did. It's just like, how do people, you know, if you live somewhere with a mild climate, and it only occasionally it gets hot, like, I understand not having AC, but in South Carolina, it's just like, it's just miserable. How did people live without AC I don't know. Yeah, anyways, that's just been annoying. It's been so annoying to deal with and to try to sleep with fans and no sheets or anything. It's like I'm also just tired because I've not been sleeping very well. But yeah, hopefully we can get that fixed.

 

Today I was going to record... I had a different episode planned to talk about NaNoWriMo. That was more of an overview of NaNoWriMo. How to decide if you should do it, pros and cons, et cetera. And I'm still going to touch on some of that, but I want to I'm changing my approach a bit because, well, let me back up a step before I get into all that. I've talked about NaNoWriMo a few times on the podcast before, if you're not familiar, if you're new to the writing space, writing community. NaNoWriMo is a it's an organization that puts on National Novel Writing Month, which happens every year, in November. And the idea behind NaNoWriMo is that you write 50,000 words in that month, and it's supposed to be like the first draft of a novel.

 

Most novels are going to be much longer than 50,000 words, but it's a really good jumping off point. It's a great starting point, and there's a community behind it. So lots of people do this. They know what happens every November. And you can create an account on NaNoWriMo website. You can do you can post, you can get support. You can meet other writers. There's just all kinds of community support built into it, which is awesome, because that's something that is really helpful for writers, and it's intense. I mean, 50,000 words in the month of November is a lot of words to write, but because it's a concentrated time period, is only for a month. It's, I think it's easier to find success than if you were like, I'm just gonna write 2000 words a day, every single day, because, like, for the rest of time.

 

So what I want to get into, though, is a statement that NaNoWriMo released recently about AI that was extremely concerning to me and that they're getting a lot of pushback on. So this statement came out a few days ago. As of the time that I'm recording this episode, I will include a link to their statement in the description of this episode so you can go check it out, but I want to read from this statement, because it's just so alarming to me, like it I read this. First of all, I heard Rebecca Thorne, an author, talk about this on Tiktok and I could not believe that she like I could not believe what I was hearing about NaNoWriMo coming out about AI, like their stance on it, so that's how I first learned about it, and then was like, Oh, I've got to update my episode. Like my my plans for this episode.

 

So on National Novel Writing Month, on their website, they have some articles. Some press releases, some blog posts. I don't know exactly what they're called, and the article is titled, What is NaNoWriMo position on on artificial intelligence? "NaNoWriMo does not explicitly support any specific approach to writing, nor does it explicitly condemn any approach, including the use of AI. NaNoWriMo mission is to provide the structure of community and encouragement to help people use their voices achieve creative goals and build new worlds on and off the page. We fulfill our mission by supporting the humans doing the writing. It goes on, they edited their their post to add a paragraph after they got a lot of pushback, we believe that let me see. We want to make it clear, though, that we find the categorical condemnation for AI to be problematic for the reasons stated below. We are troubled by the situational abuse of AI, and certain situational abuses clearly conflict with our values.

 

We also want to make it clear that AI is a large umbrella technology, and that the size and complexity of that category, which includes both non generative and generative AI, among other uses, contributes to our belief that is simply too big to categorically endorse or not endorse. We believe that to categorically condemn AI would to be ignore classist and ableist issues surrounding the use of the technology, and that questions around the use of AI tie to questions around privilege. I'm not going to read the full thing, but essentially they they believe that there are classes and ablest issues surrounding the use of AI. Not all writers, as they say, this is in their statement. Not all writers have the financial ability to hire humans ableism. Not all brains have the same abilities, and not all writers function at the same level of education or proficient proficiency, general access issues."

 

Okay, there's a lot to unpack here, and I'm not going to go super deep into this, because there are people who have really, really taken the time to break this down. There's apparently good conversations happening on Twitter about this. I'm not on Twitter, but it's astonishing to me that an organization founded around supporting people writing, encouraging people to use their voice, encouraging people to create and put their creative works out into the world, would be would not come out against technology writing like technology. Written works the whole point like if you were to use AI to write for you in NaNoWriMo in the month of November? You would need 30 days. You could ask chatgpt right now to write 50,000 words for you. I'm sure it would spit it out. Maybe you read through it once, boom, you're done. That would take you less than a day.

 

So this idea of using AI, it's like it takes the whole point of the challenge completely out of the process, and again, just for like, an organization who prides itself on supporting people who create, it's just, it's absurd. And what's interesting to me is this argument about classism and about ableism. It's implying that writers who are disabled need AI to create, that they are reliant upon AI to create, because they're not capable on their own. It implies the people who are poor need AI to create, to help them write, because they just cannot afford to do so. Otherwise, completely ignoring the fact that writing, access to writing like anyone can write. If you have an idea and a desire to see your work on a written page, you can do it.

 

Publishing is another matter. You know there are gatekeepers in traditional publishing. We know that there's bias. We know that there's a lack of diverse voices in traditional publishing and publishing at large. But when it comes to creating a book, like writing a book, telling a story, it's an equal playing field. Everyone should have the opportunity to do that, and everyone does have the opportunity to do that. So this whole thing about, let me go back to their statement here, this whole thing about classism, saying that not all writers have the financial ability to hire humans to help at certain phases of their writing, the financial ability to engage a human for feedback and review assumes the level of privilege.

 

So okay, if we're talking about editors, like if you were talking about hiring an editor to look at your work after it's done, yes, there is privilege inherent in that. I'm an editor. I know that not everyone can afford to work with me. Money. But this implies that there's just a level of financial obligation. Like, well, if you want to write a book, you're gonna have to pay money, not necessarily, no anyone can write. It's free to do so. It's free to tell a story. If you want to self publish your book and not put any money behind it, you have the ability to do that like it just boggles my mind that this is their argument. It also ignores the fact of beta reading, so many writers cannot afford to work with editors, and there are free resources out there that are called like beta reading, swapping your work with other writers to help you get feedback on your book to help you make sure that you don't have huge grammatical errors in your book. All of that is free.

 

There's this community of writers that is so good at helping each other, and this completely ignores that you do not need to spend 10s of 1000s of dollars to write a book if you have that access to money, and you want to spend a lot of money hiring people to help you? Great, you can do that, but it's not a requirement. This is not, this is just, it just boggles my mind. So AI, the foundation of AI, and why so many people are anti AI is because these AI models use existing works to train themselves. So when you put writing into something like chatgpt and ask it to give you feedback on your writing, or if you put an idea into chatgpt and ask chatgpt to write the book for you, or even part of the book for you based on your ideas, it is doing so by because it has combed through already existing works, already published works that are copyrighted, that did not give consent for their works to be used in this way, and that is how they're they're training. I'm putting training in quotes.

 

I saw on Reddit someone was talking about how they're Irish, and they asked chatgpt, they gave them a prompt, telling chatgpt to write a scene with an Irish person, and the amount of stereotypes that chatgpt spit back out was appalling. It's there are so many copyright and intellectual property issues with the idea of chatgpt. If you are using chatgpt to write for you, then you are violating those, those writers privacy. I mean, they did not give consent for chat GPT to, you know, scrape their their books, their works, whatever. There's also the problem that when you use chat GPT to write a book for you, you cannot, you don't own the copyright for that. You cannot copyright that book because you didn't write it. It is not your creation. So you can't copyright that it is it is just so problematic and murky, beyond just the simple ethical issue that is like artificially produced art versus human produced art. I I try not to get too pessimistic about the state of publishing with AI.

 

But every time that an organization puts out a statement like this, or every time that a traditional publisher puts something about AI in their contract, or whatever it is, I get a little bit more concerned. It terrifies me to imagine a world 20 years from now where publishers are churning out AI written books and there are no human books being produced. Yes, that is pessimistic. I don't actually think that's going to happen, but if I get really pessimistic and scared, that's what I think about, and it terrifies me, not just for myself, personally, because of my business that I run, and because I'm hoping to be a published author with a lot of books out there someday. But for the state of writing and reading and publishing and art at large, it's terrifying. And if you are an author, if you're a writer, if you are a reader, that should terrify the shit out of you as well.

 

I can't defend the use of AI when it comes to writing. I can't. It's just so disappointing to me to see an organization like NaNoWriMo come out with a kind of statement like this. They are getting tons of pushback, like I said, so maybe they will alter it. Maybe they'll come out with a different state. Mean, I mean, look, if chat GPT is available, people are going to use it. I'm under no delusion that you know if someone, if you're listening to this and you really want to use AI to write your book, I'm not going to be able to stop you like that's on you. But I hope that by sharing my thoughts and my concerns, that maybe that'll encourage you to consider the apple ethical implications of this, that it is not just an isolated instance of you using chat GPT to produce work or other AI models, and it's not exclusive to chat GPT. That's just the one that I'm most familiar with, the one that I think most people are familiar with, I don't know.

 

Yeah, there's so this is such a big issue, and I think that we can't bury our heads in the sand and just say, like, well, it's fine in isolation and like, whatever people are going to use AI, voila. It's just like how the industry is shifting and changing. No, I disagree with that. So when it comes to the decision of if you want to do NaNoWriMo, this is going to be an individual thing. I was not planning to participate in NaNoWriMo this year, so it doesn't affect my decision at all. One other thing I want to share. I don't know details about this, but if this is something that you are, that you haven't heard about last year or the year before, I can't remember when exactly this took place. There was a what was it? There were allegations of someone who's a child abuser gaining access to forums for the young writers program that NaNoWriMo has and essentially grooming kids who are participating in that through messages.

 

NaNoWriMo did not handle that well, and so there they've been in hot water, rightfully so. I mean, that's really fucking disgusting. They've been in hot water before this whole AI thing. And that was enough to make a lot of people say, You know what, we're just gonna part ways with this organization. We're not supporting NaNoWriMo anymore. Then with this whole AI statement, you know it is. It's going to be a decision that you have to make for yourself. Whether you do NaNoWriMo, you can create an account on their website. I am going to delete my account I made one years ago, and again I wasn't planning on participating in NaNoWriMo this year anyway, so I wasn't going to log in or anything. But I'm going to just delete my account.

 

If you do participate, something to consider is that you're not going to be starting the brainstorming process on November 1. My recommendation is to take the months of September and October to plan and prep and brainstorm so that when November 1 hits, you could hit the ground running and look, NaNoWriMo is not this isn't set in stone that you have to do 50,000 words, that you have to log on and participate in forums, if you just decide to set a writing challenge for yourself in the month of November, and not call it NaNoWriMo and not participate officially. I think that might be the best way to go, honestly. So maybe for you, that's like, okay, in the month of November, I'm gonna write the first 20,000 words in my book. Or in the month of November, I'm gonna write every single day, not set a word count, but just I'm gonna write every single day. Awesome.

 

So you can always tweak the challenge and not actually participate in the official NaNoWriMo organization. Yeah, that's an option too. But whatever you decide, I think it's good to do ahead, ahead of time. That's why I'm part of why I'm releasing this episode early, like in September, so that you have time to think about it and to prepare so that you don't so that you know what your plan is for the month of November, and you can just focus on what you want to focus on. I also want to mention, I talked about this a few weeks ago on an episode, but I am doing another round of novel jumpstart, which is my program to help you write the first 50 pages of your book. And there are going to be just a small number of spots available.

 

It starts in mid October, and it'll run through mid December, so we wrap up before the holidays, and it's eight weeks you get access to an online course. There's going to be coaching calls that we have once a week where you can ask questions, get help. And there's also a discord group that we'll have so you can be posting for accountability. You're just kind of like getting to know the other writers in the group. So I'll have more information about that coming out in early October, but just put a pin in that if you've been thinking about. It, and I before I knew about this whole AI business and NaNoWriMo stance on it, I did that intentionally with the scheduling. Number one, so that we could wrap up before the holidays.

 

But number two, so that if you did want to participate in NaNoWriMo, it would fit nicely with this, because you'll have a couple of weeks to prep in October, maybe even start writing, and then in November, you can hit the ground running, write as much as you can. Maybe write 50,000 words, and then wrap up the novel jumpstart program in December. So that can that can work for you, if that's something that you are interested in. So again, I'll have more information about that coming out soon, but just wanted to remind you that that is coming up so you can think about that too. It's I don't know. I encourage you, if this is an issue that you're interested in to please go on Twitter.

 

Again -- I'm not on Twitter, but from what I've heard, there are really good conversations happening there, with disabled writers, with writers who are from underrepresented backgrounds, really outing their voices into this conversation, especially because AI's or NaNoWriMo statement specifically called out like disabled writers. So yeah, I think it'd be good to listen to their their thoughts and their input on this. I'm going to be doing the same. And yeah, it just again. It's mind boggling to me that an organization like NaNoWriMo would just not condemn the use of AI. And it, the thing is, is like it doesn't, it doesn't matter, like, even if they had come out strongly and said, Whoa, let me back up. I didn't want, I didn't mean to say It doesn't matter. Let me delete that. I'll explain what I mean.

 

Even if NaNoWriMo had come out and said, We are categorically against the use of AI in writing, we do not support this. We encourage our authors who are participating in NaNoWriMo not to use AI tools like chatgpt. Even if they had come out strongly against it, people would still be free to use those things, because, unfortunately, people are going to use them. It's like, the it's like, I don't know. It's like, it's there. The technology is there. We can't go back to before it existed. And to deny its existence or try to, like, make it go away, is not the right approach. But I just wish that they had done the right thing. I wish that they had said they had put their voice behind human art and human works of creativity, as opposed to, like, we don't know it's too big to condemn, so just whatever, it's really disappointing.

 

I wish that they would have done the right thing, because it does matter, in the sense that if big organizations are not standing up against AI, it does make me concerned for the future of publishing and writing and any creative work, because it's going to become normalized. That's my fear, is that we're just going to see this flood of AI written books in publishing, and it's just going to become so normal that we won't think about it anymore. And I don't want us as a society to get to that point. So yeah, so reach out or look at resources on social media online about this issue, because it's a big one. Listen to people who are more affected by this, and, you know, make an informed decision about if you want to support this kind of organization, if you want to participate, or if you want to, like, set your own kind of challenge in the month of November.

 

So okay, I'm gonna try not to get too pessimistic about state of writing and NaNoWriMo, and I hope that you're with me on that, that we can continue to advocate for human produced books, human produced art, because it is an essential part of our society, and I just never want to get to a place where we don't have that. So okay, I'll get off my soapbox. Thank you for listening and taking this all into consideration when it comes to NaNoWriMo, and I will see you next week.

Katie Wolf