NaNoWriMo and AI

Gaslighting human writers

Image: NaNoWriMo logo, modified

I know of many authors who have taken part in the annual project known as NaNoWriMo. While I’ve never participated, I’ve heard that those who do often feel encouraged and motivated to meet their self-imposed challenge to write a 50,000-word manuscript during the month of November. Among other perks, the effort includes pep talks from well-known authors, as well as a sense of community. It puts me in mind of how Weight Watchers works.

This year, there’s a change, one I consider troubling for a number of reasons. And I’m not alone.

AI has entered the arena in a big way.

NaNoWriMo, a non-profit, has signed up with a sponsor company called ProWritingAid. This company offers a suite of AI tools focused on writing, some of which might be considered benign on their own. But from what I see in this “suite,” the more tools someone uses, the more artificial their work will be. It could easily take the creativity out of... well, out of creativity.

I think it’s safe to say that most people, including authors, have no problem with the kind of AI that helps with things like spell-check or speech recognition. But generative AI, which is included among ProWritingAid’s suite of tools, is another matter altogether.

By way of example, let’s take a simple phrase (1, below), then show what AI might do with it (2), and then what I, as a human writer might do with it, given some skill, some creativity, and the ability to imagine myself in someone else’s place (3).

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(1) Martha couldn’t wait to see Jon, who had been a political prisoner in Columbia for three years.

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(2) Martha and Jon hadn’t seen each other for the three years he’d been a political prisoner in Columbia. She had longed for him, even dreamed of him. His pleasure at seeing her was evident. They hugged each other, and after a moment they kissed.

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(3) Three years. It had been three years since Martha had laid eyes on the man. No one could have tallied the number of hours she’d spent thinking of him, dreaming of him, having nightmares about what might be happening to him. Certainly, she had lost count to the point where seeing him again was what she had begun to live for.

And now, as she stood on the tarmac watching the plane—Jon’s plane—approach, she barely registered the high-pitched whine of airplane engines. Her eyes, laser-like, were trained on the door through which the man she had pledged to marry would appear.

Suddenly, so very suddenly, there he was before her. If she could have focused on anything other than his face she would have felt how hard her heart was beating, how rapid her breathing had become, and how very flushed her face felt. It was sudden, and yet it seemed to take minutes for her arms and Jon’s to pull them together, an age for their bodies to align, and an eon for their faces to be close enough for the kiss Martha had longed for since Jon had been taken captive. She barely noticed how emaciated three years as a political prisoner in Columbia had left him. At this moment, none of that mattered. He was home. He was hers once more. All would be well.

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Now, you might say that of course, readers would get much more out of the third example, even if it is a little melodramatic. But what if they don’t ever see it? What if they become so accustomed to AI’s pale imitation of genuine human experience that they read that second example and move on with the story? That second example isn’t really “writing.” And to get better at writing, AI will need to collect, mash together, and regurgitate the writing of lots of human authors, without credit or remuneration to them.

Think for a moment about the personal stories of U.S. citizens who have been told to train someone overseas to do their job and are then fired as “redundant.”

The defense NaNoWriMo offers to protestors lacks credibility.

I phrased that heading in a way much nicer than I wanted to. Because here’s what they’re saying:

They want to support “those who may not have the financial or creative means to overcome the various difficulties that can come from writing.”

I’ll start with the financial point. On the main landing page for ProWritingAid, they feature only two of their three plans, both of which have costs associated with them. (There is a third plan, which you must dig to find; it’s free, but it doesn’t offer many features.) So there goes any genuine concern for would-be writers who can’t afford to write. (I’m not sure what this concern would be, even if genuine; the expense of writing doesn’t come from the writing, but from everything a self-published author must do after the writing is over.)

And as for that second “reason,” concerning the lack of creative means, what exactly does that mean? Because it sounds like, “So, you can’t write? No worries; we’ve got you covered.”

I’m sympathetic; I’d love to be able to draw, or paint, but—alas, even stick figures challenge me. AI could help me, of course, but it can’t make me an artist. These days, the process of getting a book onto Amazon asks whether AI was used in any part of the creative effort. Do I believe that users of ProWritingAid will say Yes to that? I do not.

NaNoWriMo is gaslighting writers who protest.

I think this is my favorite aspect, in terms of my personal protest. It’s a direct quote from NaNoWriMo (bolding added by me):

“We also want to be clear in our belief that the categorical condemnation of Artificial Intelligence has classist and ableist undertones, and that questions around the use of AI tie to questions around privilege.”

Photo from The Psychology Group, Ft. Lauderdale, FL

First, while there are protestors against AI that condemn it “categorically,” that’s not what’s going on here. Writers and authors are very specific. There’s a lot more to AI beyond writing; ergo, protesting that we don’t want our creative work scraped for the benefit of teaching a machine to replace us as writers is far from “categorical.”

Second, people with any specialized skill reasonably expect to get credit for and to be paid for their work. This expectation is neither classist, ableist, nor privileged.

There are individuals who make their living doing things I could never do. Let’s say I can run a four-point-two-minute mile, but I want to compete at the Olympics. So I take performance-enhancing drugs to increase my speed. Would this be allowed? No? Why not? Isn’t it ableist to deny me that advantage so that I can compete with the runners who are better at it than I am? Aren’t those better athletes “privileged?”

What is the source of the writing “tools” AI offers?

And we’ve come to the most infuriating, and the most egregious aspect. Programs like ProWritingAid offer features no machine could ever do, without learning from work done by people. There are lots of good ways AI could be put to use. However, when the machine learns by essentially plagiarizing the work done by humans... well, there are laws against plagiarism for good reason. It takes me roughly a year to write a novel. If an AI company scrapes my work for phrases, plot lines, sentence structure, character descriptions, or anything else, and then sells “their” product, where does that leave me? I’ve done the creating; AI just mimics me.

There are already untold numbers of books available that are mostly or even completely AI-generated. I hear that they aren’t very good, but I also hear that they sell. Money spent on AI books is money not spent on a book that took a real person months or even years to write. And let’s be honest: If the world needs more books, they should be books wroth reading, not books for the sake of more books regardless of what’s in them.

And here’s something authors understand intrinsically, something readers who are not also writers might not see: AI is about delivering a product for which money can be charged; it cares about nothing else. Fiction writing is about the process at least as much as it’s about the product. It’s reaching inside your own mind, imagining being inside someone else mind, experiencing what they’re feeling, and then using a finely honed craft to present all of that in descriptive words and phrases that reach into the heart and mind of the reader and give them their own version of that experience.

In short, fiction is about human experience.

As linguist Emily M. Bender has noted, teachers don’t have students write essays because the world needs more essays. Children need to learn critical thinking, organized presentation, and how to communicate effectively—skills that will serve them well throughout their lives. Having AI do their assignments teaches them nothing.

NaNoWriMo is paving a writing path right into artificial intelligence, away from the complex effort writing is (and, in my not-so-humble opinion) should be. Writing is both a skill and an art. And NaNoWriNo has joined forces with a thief.

Image: FotoRichter

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I’m an inveterate observer of human nature, writing novels about all kinds of people, some of whom happen to be gay or transgender or bisexual or intersex—people whose destinies are not determined solely by their sexual orientation or gender identity. Check out my work on my website.