NaNoHellNo

Statement on my Resignation from the NaNoWriMo Writers Board

NanoWriMo — the organization that encourages people to write 50k words in Novemeber — has taken a wild and ridiculous stand in favor of Generative AI, claiming that criticizing it “ableist” and “classist” and so I immediately stepped down from their Writers Board with this series of tweets:

And this email to the board:

Greetings.

Writing formally here in case the message I posted on Twitter didn't reach you. Your position on AI is vile, craven, and unconscionable. You are harming writers and you are harming the planet. While your new, PR clean up of the statement tries to put distance between what you're talking about and Generative AI, it's abundantly clear you're talking about Generative AI and even if it wasn't, your sponsor ProWritingAid is explicitly a Gen AI endeavor. Finally, your heinous re-configuring of language used to fight actual injustices into a shield to cover your transparently business-based posturing is unforgivable. 

No need to respond, not interested in debating this with you. 

Let's end it like this: I am officially stepping down from your Writers Board effective immediately and urging every writer I know to do the same. Never use my name in your promo again, in fact never say my name at all and never email me again. 

I mean that in all seriousness. 

Thanks! 

Just want to be clear on a couple things, since the tweet got some attention and, judging from the responses, broke the news of their position to a fair number of people.

To be clear, their statement changed some once they started catching hell about it online. Here are the two versions with the original first:

It just got murkier and more nonsensical, really. Very Gen AI style.

Being on the Writers Board is not a big deal

This is not any kind of heroic move on my part. Being the Writers Board comes with zero benefits and requires zero effort from me. It’s basically my name on their list of Writers Board members, and them emailing me on “Hispanic Heritage Month” asking to boost something or make a video. I think I’ve made one video and written a few little blog posts for them since I joined the Writers Board in 2017. I don’t say this to distance myself from them — I did that by stepping down. I say it to give clarity to what it means to be on the Writers Board, because have been understandably confused. We don’t have a say in shit. Some folks were surprised that Nano had posted that clown ass statement without consulting us, and I get it, but I would’ve been more surprised if they’d emailed us about an actual thing of substance or a question of any consequence. For transparency, this was how being on the board was described to me:

“Here are some specifics of what being on the Writers Board could involve:

Contribute to NaNoWriMo programming via webcasts, tweet chats, blog posts, etc., if possible.

Help make connections to publishers, the media, and key writers who can help NaNoWriMo.

Lend your name to our "masthead" to help establish credibility for NaNo--which would just mean letting us post your photo and bio on our website.

Help with fundraising--as desired--through such things as participating in a webinar or making introductions to funders.”  

So yeah, light lift. I like the idea of writers being encouraged to write and it didn’t require anything from me so I said yeah and then proceeded to basically never think about it again except to say yes or no to an email request every 8 months or something.

Gen AI is Garbage

It is terrible for humanity and it is terrible for the environment. It kills jobs and it kills plants and animals. Also, it makes cursed, soulless garbage. And it steals shit (and I mean shit affectionately here) without permission, shit that people worked hard on and poured their heart and soul into, and repurposes that shit into said cursed soulless garbage. Smarter people have explained this better than I can, most recently Ted Chiang in the New Yorker.

AI is another clown-shaped bubble that is about to pop, and go the way of NFTs. It can’t happen fast enough.

in closing…

An organization for writers that supports Gen AI is not an organization for writers. It’s a clown car. As I said in the email, NaNo’s revised version of the statement tries to put on a show of not necessarily referring to Generative AI. They are very clearly referring to Generative AI though. Yes, there are other types of AI out there and they don’t all steal shit and ruin everything. Spellcheck is AI; Gmail uses AI. There are nuances to this conversation and NaNo is trying to exploit those nuances to make a toxic sludge stain look like a butterfly. They are absolutely talking about Generative AI and one of the ways we can be sure about that is that one of their sponsors, ProWritingAid, is a Gen AI company that seems to be using ChatGPT. OpenAI, which developed ChatGPT, recently whined to the UK parliament that it can’t make any money if it doesn’t scrape copyrighted work (without permission, also known as stealing) to feed its crappy little crap engine — a point that somehow goes unremarked on in that little write up they posted on ChatGPT, shockingly.

Speaking of NaNo exploiting things, please observe their use of the language of social justice to defend their ghoulish position. As someone who has spent my whole writing career fighting to make the bookshelf more honestly represent the world we live in, I can’t express enough how repulsive it is to watch an organization co-opt those arguments into a cursed, soulless excuse for its own terrible practices.

That’s the long and the short of it. From PEN America to Nano, our writing organizations are failing us at a tremendous clip these days. Let’s turn away forever from these propped up corpses of long dead ideas reanimated for profit and power. And what will we build in the wake of their aggressive nosedive into irrelevance? Communities that are more human, not less, I hope; ways of uplifting each other and moving through this burning world together that bring us collectively toward freedom.

Fuck Gen AI. And as always, Free Palestine.