the funniest thing about nanowrimo allowing LLMs to be used to write is that there already exists and has existed for well over a decade an equivalent project, NaNoGenMo, about writing code to generate 50k words. it's always been tongue-in-cheek, but some of the submissions are genuinely interesting and funny - people finding the most absurd ways they can generate 50k words, or people making enormous walls of ASCII art and calling it a "novel," etc. it's been going on since long, long before LLMs existed.
one of the most memorable for me was someone generating a script for two players playing the card game "war," and running it over and over again until they reached a game so unbearably long and tedious that it crossed the 50k word threshold.
like, obviously, writing code to generate many "words" can be beautiful, can be thought-provoking, is a project in itself. and they could have appealed to that. but no they said "it's racist of you to not like the prose of chatGPT." says a lot about their intentions and what they consider to be the point of nanowrimo!
i never read the original statement, so apologies if this is inaccurate, but my understanding was that nanowrimo was allowing / promoting / suggesting human-guided LLM writing (i.e., asking it for editing advice, scene descriptions, etc.) where the process is still largely manual prompting, compositing, and editing.
this seems like a very different beast from nanogenmo. i haven’t looked at all the entries from every year, but my understanding is that they’re programs you can run multiple times with different seeds / inputs / etc. and get different results. even though annals of the parrigues has a hand-written ending, you could theoretically generate as many additional counties and towns as you wanted. i don’t think using chatgpt to edit your nanowrimo entry is automated in the same way, and it makes sense people wouldn’t want to submit an at the very least human directed work to the generative novel competition.
my only point of reference for that kind of workflow is this piece from the verge about amazon authors using ai. to be clear, i don’t think any of these authors are really making high art. (which is due to their economic incentives, not because they’re using ai.)
when i read the article, i don’t think the authors are really engaging with generative art. it’s a writing exercise, not a design one. that — to me — makes which event it belongs in clear.