My relationship with NaNoWriMo has always been at arm’s-length. Every November, I sit down and try to get at least fifty thousand words out, because it’s great for getting me that crucial first draft. But I never got into that entire world. Good instincts, I suppose.
If the interface is being wonky: NaNoWriMo has decided to say that they don’t judge people for using AI to hit their NaNoWriMo numbers (…well, all right, although it does make the whole exercise somewhat silly). Alas, it then went on to helpfully explain that anybody who disagreed with this were both ableist AND classist. There was also apparently this entire grooming thing going on earlier, but that’s just me enthusiastically poisoning the well. Hey, nobody ever said that logical fallacies weren’t allowed to be fun.
Still, I still refuse to use AI, and think it has no ethical place in the commercial market. I also find ‘ableist’ and ‘classist’ to be nearly semantic-free slurs, although I will happily sign off on ‘arrogant snob.’ Truth is, after all, an absolute defense to libel.
I’m sanguine about LLMs, but this is stupid.
This isn’t the NaNoWriMo that I remember. Way of the world, I suppose. Good things get popular, then corrupted. I stopped participating three years ago. I still have fond memories of the early days.