Writing Space
Well that came out of nowhere, after getting myself all prepped for the way I was going to approach NaNoWriMo for the very first time, getting myself into the mind space, setting up the account, doing a lot of reading around how to approach it, setting up a separate Scrivener document, we get the revelation that NaNoWriMo feels that the use of AI to assist the writing process is perfectly OK and to deny this is classist and ableist.
My main contention is that you cannot justify the use of a system that blatantly stole copyrighted material from authors and use it to ‘improve’ your own writing and call your own writing original. It will always be an amalgam of other’s works, and then how could you then ever shout foul if someone stole your work and sold it on the Internet without paying you anything?
It also seems that this has come about just as an LLM AI tool has become one of NaNoWriMos sponsors, go figure!
I somehow missed that nanowrimo is now sponsored by a ChatGPT “writing” “aid”
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— Courtney Milan (@courtneymilan.com) Sep 2, 2024 at 15:55
The whole idea of NaNoWriMo was about community, encouragement, and growth. I’d set up the account, looked into local meet-ups with others who were going to be involved and all these people would be in the same boat and able to help with t he development of my writing as I would be there to help them.
I’ve had to delete my account (I try to do this for anything that has used copyrighted material to develop an AI or work with such a piece of software), but I’m still looking at joining a local writing group to get that support that is oh so needed but going about developing my writing in a far more organic way as I’d already given myself ‘permission’ to start writing this year I just won’t be doing it through NaNoWriMo.
The giving of permission has been quite freeing actually and I was really looking forward to starting to get a writing practice established but hadn’t really realised that I’d been writing for quite a few years n the form of the blogs I put out, various reviews, various streams of consciousness, and of course the tarot introduction booklet. So what I’m going to do now is find that local writing group to join and give myself permission to write what I want to write when I want to write it without having to think that a company like NaNoWriMo is the thing that is going to clear all my blockages, no it is me writing that will clear all those blockages.
