The organization behind National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) is being slammed online after it claimed that opposing the use of AI writing tools is “classist and ableist.” On Saturday, NaNoWriMo published its stance on the technology, announcing that it doesn’t explicitly support or condemn any approach to writing.
“We believe that to categorically condemn AI would be to ignore classist and ableist issues surrounding the use of the technology, and that questions around the use of AI tie to questions around privilege,” NaNoWriMo said, arguing that “not all brains” have the “same abilities” and that AI tools can reduce the financial burden of hiring human writing assistants.
NaNoWriMo’s annual creative writing event is the organization’s flagship program that challenges participants to create a 50,000-word manuscript every November. Last year, the organization said that it accepts novels written with the help of AI apps like ChatGPT but noted that doing so for the entire submission “would defeat the purpose of the challenge.”
Nanowrimo is already in flames because of last years ‘groomer mod’ scandal. Why would they choose now to weigh in on such a controversial topic rather than working on filling all the staff vacancies, rebuilding trust in their community, and developing new volunteers to replace all the ones they fired and ghosted? All they’ve got to do here is keep their mouths shut and rebuild the damn organization and they can’t even do that…
You’re going to make me look that up, aren’t you? Here’s a good summary of said ‘groomer mod’ scandal.