Creatively Disabled Authors and the AI Crutch

Writing a novel is hard. Writing one in a month is insane. Unless you are William Faulkner, who wrote As I Lay Dying in six weeks, between the hours of midnight and four in the morning. Indeed, the author himself claimed, “I set out deliberately to write a tour-de-force. Before I ever put pen to paper and set down the first word I knew what the last word would be and almost where the last period would fall.” Faulker said he did not change a word in the end.

Some might say Faulkner was touched by the Divine. Lucky him! For the rest of us mere mortals deprived of such succor, we have only practice with which to sharpen our quills. This was essentially the point of the nonprofit that organized the annual National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo).

Since it was founded in 1999, NaNoWriMo has encouraged authors to pump out a draft for a novel every November. Some titles have gone on to become hits. But all that is coming to an end now, as the organization shuts down for good due to financial issues. The most interesting thing about NaNoWriMo’s demise is that it comes less than a year after the organization defended the use of artificial intelligence in writing on the grounds that condemning it would be “classist and ableist.”

In essence, NaNoWriMo argued that the inability to write competently or imaginatively is akin to a disability. In this framing, AI-assisted writing—which could mean whole stories generated based on mere prompts—was like a pair of crutches for the creatively infirm. Thus, those who complained that using AI in this way was unfair to human art and craft were cruelly trying to kick out the braces from underneath the impaired.

This reasoning did not go over well with writers—disabled or otherwise.

NaNoWriMo was flooded with a deluge of scorn. Board members resigned and publicly shamed the organization, while bestselling authors and writers—including those who had partnered with the group—did the same.

Some of the criticism was amusing, for example, “Thanks to ai, I just finished my nanowrimo novel a few months early. I’m excited to read it,” one Bluesky user wrote in response to the decision.

Others, like science fiction author John Scalzi, pointed to what they suspected may have been the real reason for NaNoWriMo’s decision to embrace AI.

“The number of disabled writers I’ve seen calling out NaNoWriMo on this should give that organization pause. It really does feel that the organization was employing the ‘classist, ableist’ phrasing to pre-emptively shut down any legit criticism of their partnership with an AI company,” Scalzi wrote.

Creatives are generally wary of AI because they see its use as a kind of theft that not only apes humans but also deprives them of their due: compensation. Oftentimes, you will hear the proponents of AI declare things like intellectual property law as a relic that stifles innovation so that greedy authors and artists can eat another day, which is the line that both Jack Dorsey and Elon Musk took recently.

Of course, someone is always making money. Allowing AI to train—that is, to plagiarize—the works of others without compensation just means that there is a funnel of wealth from creatives to those who are stealing from creators to develop these digital models.

Maybe NaNoWriMo thought it could make up for its financial shortfall by selling writers out. Who knows. But even taken at face value, the reason it tried to use to justify its decision was hilariously out of touch with the heart of writing.

Suffering is an inextricable part of the process of writing. It is not supposed to be easy. The act of bringing an idea into this world, plucking it out of the ether, and nurturing it is meant to be hard because it is fundamentally human, which is to say, we are the only creatures in the known cosmos endowed with such gifts. NaNoWriMo forgot that, and now it too will be forgotten.

Source: https://chroniclesmagazine.org/web/creatively-disabled-authors-and-the-ai-crutch/