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.”
While I wouldn’t condone using an AI to create an entire novel, I would be fine with a human using ChatGPT to generate topics, prompts, and check spelling & grammar.
AI is a tool. It can be used for good, and it can be used for bad. Much like a hammer. There are both good and bad ways to use them.
There’s no reason for there to be prohibition of AI generation; just prohibition of AI Generation being the only source of text.