I'm struggling to remember who it was who said it, but the best counter I've seen to this specific argument goes "If you're using generative AI to fill in the gaps in your writing, the difficult-to-write bits where you need to get character a to location b for the plot to work, than you're going to have a problem because it's terrible at that. Same with dialogue, same with pacing and structure. About the only thing it can do decently well is give you a starting idea of what the story should be, and if you need AI to do that than maybe writing isn't for you."
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in reply to @SanguinaryNovel's post:
honestly we probably deserve a text generator trained on NaNo forums. let chaos take the world
The most generous interpretation I was able to come up with is
people with disabilities or low written-language skills need tools to help them write
which seems to be conflating things like spell check or assistive tech (e.g. dictation software) with large language models. Sure, in a loose sense, all those things are "AI" but that's a bad-faith use of the label. Also, I'm still not sure how to get from there to "classist".
I'd like to award the NaNo mods a medal in mental gymnastics, because that was a STRETCH.
I tried to continue the spirit of good faith interpretation for classism and thought they must mean something like, "using generative ai to connect scenes you've written can save time for people who may not have as much free time as others," which I think could be defensible if the goal is to finish a personal project in a tight deadline, but then I looked up this entry and it turns out they just mean "poor people should use ai instead of paying editors"
so I think your evaluation is completely right and they're willingly walking into conversations about pancakes to talk about waffles
I actually think it may be them saying that genAI tools can help people without much of an education in what makes good writing make their writing better/higher class? But that’s also presuming that the genAI can help you edit your existing writing and ideas rather than you having to edit the genAI output to not get nonsense, and even then it’s still probably complete tripe?
Is the point of nanowrimo not to improve as a writer? Even with all things considered why would you endorse usage of the writing-things-for-you-tool in the course of encouraging people to write?
i've seen the ableism argument in favour of ai before but i would love to know how they contorted themselves into justifying this on the basis of class. who are the people with access to ai tools but not writing tools?
nanowrimo believes that EVERYONE should have access to the unethical meat grinder
It looks like the full page explains what they mean by classist and abelist, and wow it's even worse.
"Classism. Not all writers have the financial ability to hire humans to help at certain phases of their writing. For some writers, the decision to use AI is a practical, not an ideological, one. The financial ability to engage a human for feedback and review assumes a level of privilege that not all community members possess.
"Ableism. Not all brains have same abilities and not all writers function at the same level of education or proficiency in the language in which they are writing. Some brains and ability levels require outside help or accommodations to achieve certain goals. The notion that all writers 'should' be able to perform certain functions independently or is a position that we disagree with wholeheartedly. There is a wealth of reasons why individuals can't "see' the issues in their writing without help."
"Poor people are bad writers cuz they can't hire editors" is a hell of an argument to make considering we've had Hollywood films that don't hire editors.
Also shout-out to them explaining what ableism is by just being outright ableist themselves. The fuck is this gated-community-speak?
Who out there is feeling obligated to hire an editor for a NaNoWriMo project? This is a fun run, not an Olympic marathon. People expect something you wrote in a month to be unpolished.
Though if you did hire a human editor, they'd be able to give you useful critique on your plot, pacing, structure, characters, and other big-picture things an LLM cannot possibly be helpful with.
The full page elaborates on the reasoning and both aspects are very offputting. I think it's more classist to imply that people had to spend money to be decent writers before the advent of AI. And though the question of accessibility in writing is complicated, I've never been fully onboard with the idea that the goal of a disabled writer should be to write like a non-disabled writer. Especially since specifying generative AI in the conversation implies one would rather read a computer imitating a nondisabled human than a disabled writer's own voice.
"Especially since specifying generative AI in the conversation implies one would rather read a computer imitating a nondisabled human than a disabled writer's own voice."
This is such an important point that also ties into actual ableist aspects of social behavior/expectations. Why is the onus on the disabled writer/person to mask that aspect of themself to suit the norm and expectations of a creative field/social landscape that doesn't even consider their ability to contribute? Non-disabled people in creative sectors and society as a whole have a responsibility to advocate for and actively make space to accept, showcase, and celebrate the different perspectives and artistry that only people with disabilities can provide. Assistive and adaptive tools do not exist to cover up disabilities, or to make people who are disabled more "palatable" to a society that does not understand them. they're there to aid people with different levels of ability in connecting with and experiencing a world that is not built with them in mind- and that absolutely should not mean erasing or hiding the features of the self that may "other" a disabled person. How will society ever expand to better support disabled people if they're essentially forced to conform through "tools" like AI that are basically an aggregate of the lowest common denominators in a dataset? Which is likely a sinister possibility- by claiming AI as an adaptive tool, those who end up with no choice but to utilize it (with AAC devices or other speech and communication aids, for example) are made to express themselves in a manner dictated by LLM so "everyone" can have an easier time pretending disabled people don't exist
as if the primary critique of AI was that people were using it to finish novels quickly, and not that it is a labor deskilling technology that relies on surveillance data and cheap labor to function, with huge environmental costs? what an absurd sentiment - that it’s ableist to oppose AI, but somehow not ableist to traumatize workers who have to sort through Nazi speech for two bucks an hour. Come on.
i don't fully know how to articulate this, but i feel as though the "being anti-AI is ableist" nonsense is itself ableist
It's a claim that disabled people need an LLM to write for them, or else their writing isn't "good." So yeah, 100% ableist.
AI stuff aside, the NaNo site doesn't save user-submitted text. The validation box is just for verifying word count at the end, since different word processors can have some variation, and verifying gives you the badges and stuff.
You can put literally whatever you want to in at the end as long as the word count is accurate, and it won't be retained by the site.
So at the very least, they will not be able to use your work to train anything (unless you post it publicly on the forums or whatever, but that's nothing new at this point)
Is it guaranteed that they aren't saving the text, and that they won't in the future?
It doesn't save any of the text on their servers. If their policy changed, they'd have to make it very clear in their ToS
Also, since it's just a word count validator and otherwise doesn't do anything with the text, you can scramble/replace/otherwise make illegible your text before putting it in the submission box.
If I remember correctly, they even have a message on that page saying something to the effect of "we don't save anything, but you can scramble the text before uploading if you'd like."
You don't upload a file or anything like that.
(I've participated in NaNoWriMo off and on since 2010, so I can confirm they didn't save anything in the past)
the annoying thing about this is like. it probably took them 10 seconds to type "please write me an argument against condemnation of AI writing tools, intended to convince a socially-conscious left-leaning audience" into their prompt prompt.
