Thu 31 October 2024

FediFriend Amin wrote this in Early September:

Well, NaNoWriMo has made an official statement that they believe categorical condemnation of "AI" to be classist and ableist. I'm… I'm just done with them.

I used to overlook issues I was seeing with the organization behind NaNo, but… this is too much.

Their argument appears to boil down to "without LLMs many people don't know how to write and proofread their novels", but isn't that exactly what NaNoWriMo is supposed to be teaching people to do for themselves?

— https://alpha.polymaths.social/@amin/statuses/01J6T38E3EH375CJF55KMDH3WP

I don't have a long history with NaNoWriMo. Last year was my first time doing it, with the modest goal of (as I recall) 15 blog posts. I never used the official website, only interacting with the community on the Fediverse. I had heard about it many years prior, however, and I recall discussing it circa 2015 with a college classmate that as active in it.

I can echo Amin's disgust with the "classist and ableist" cop-out, and I also recall hearing some of the community's frustration with the ironically accessibility-hostile re-design of the nanowrimo website a couple years back. I have no interest in getting involved with an organization that uses a spurious argument of ableism against the incredibly valid criticisms of adding yet another layer of LLM slop to our lives.

I have changed (retconned) all tags from NaNoWriMo to WritingMonth in the entire blog, but I haven't changed references "NaNoWriMo" in the body text of any previous articles (there were only two).

In addition, my Writing Month profile can be found here.

Writing Month begins!

Category: Writing Tagged: Ethics Non-religious post Non-technical post Writing WritingMonth