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National Novel Writing Month has long been known for its quirky, homegrown approach to creativity: Write a novel during the month of November! Just jot down 50,000 words while you’re knocking out holiday shopping and basting a turkey! But last Friday, the 25-year-old nonprofit, known as NaNoWriMo for short, shocked many in the writing community when it published a controversial statement detailing its position on AI. In it, NaNoWriMo asserted that the “categorical condemnation” of artificial intelligence has “classist and ableist undertones.”
The statement went viral on social media over the weekend, drawing fire from longtime participants and well-known authors, some of whom credit the completion of their first novels to the organization. Four members of NaNoWriMo’s writers board, including science fiction/fantasy writer Daniel José Older and fantasy writer Cass Morris, have now publicly stepped down from their roles in response. One of the organization’s sponsors, Ellipsus, which advertises itself as a “principled alternative to Google Docs” and is staunchly opposed to the use of generative AI in its products, has officially withdrawn its sponsorship.
Though it’s not clear what prompted the organization to release the message—which was published on its Zendesk page, where participants can learn more about the organization and troubleshoot issues, and not on NaNo’s official blog—it states that NaNoWriMo does not “explicitly support” or “condemn” any one approach to writing. Elaborating further, it says that to “categorically condemn AI would be to ignore classist and ableist issues surrounding the use of the technology.”
As an example, the organization says that the ability to hire a human for feedback on writing “assumes a level of privilege” that not every writer has. It adds that “not all brains have [the] same abilities,” and that some may “require outside help or accommodations to achieve certain goals.”
In an email to NaNo’s board, Older, the New York Times best-selling author of the fantasy series Outlaw City and story architect of the multimedia series Star Wars: The High Republic, called its position on AI “vile, craven, and unconscionable.”
“Your heinous re-configuring of language used to fight actual injustices into a shield to cover your transparently business-based posturing is unforgivable,” Older added. (As of this writing, NaNoWriMo has not responded to a list of questions from WIRED about the statement and fallout.)
The dustup within the NaNoWriMo community seems to be boiling over just as proponents and detractors of AI argue over its value and usefulness in creative fields. Every kind of writer, from fanfic scribes to journalists, has wondered about whether or not it is scraping their work from the open internet. Some authors, like Stephen Marche, have found ways to use it as a tool; others swear they’d never touch the stuff. Amidst all this, NaNoWriMo, a one-time haven for amateur writers of all kinds, seemingly took the stance that not only is it wrong to condemn AI, doing so is an affront to poor people or disabled people who may use it.
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Morris, another member of NaNo’s writers board, first learned of the statement early Monday morning from a Facebook friend’s post. She immediately took action, publicly severing her ties with the organization, and even deleting her decades-old account on the NaNo site. ”I have a very hard line when it comes to these generative AI programs,” she says.
In a blog post, Morris elaborated on the issues she has with the use of AI in creative work: The platforms are unethical, the tech scrapes content from published authors without paying royalties or fees, and it robs writers of the opportunity to find their own voice and learn from mistakes. Every time another organization allies itself with an AI platform, she feels a sense of defeat. “It is a battle that creative people are having to fight on so many fronts, and it is exhausting,” she says.
C. L. Polk, author of the Hugo-nominated fantasy series The Kingston Cycle, who identifies as disabled “along multiple axes,” called NaNo’s stance “bad fiction.” Polk took to Bluesky to condemn the nonprofit’s stance, saying, “NaNo is basically asserting that disabled people don't have what it takes to create art when they trot out the lie that scorning AI is ableist.” The author added, “Saying that disabled people need unremarkable and unoriginal writing is a pile of horseshit.”
Longtime participants, some of whom have been taking part in NaNo for decades, have also been reeling from what they feel is yet another betrayal by an organization that they say has ignored ongoing issues with the platform and alienated members and volunteers.
Jenai May was a participant in NaNo for more than two decades and a volunteer leader, also known as a municipal liaison, for her local region for about half of that time. NaNoWriMo typically boasts a volunteer force of nearly 800 leaders and coordinators, but many have recently left the organization, according to several sources.
May credits NaNoWriMo with giving her the confidence she needed to believe she could write a book, “with an inner transformation that was so powerful, I dedicated 10 years of my life to volunteering for them year-round.”
May is herself neurodivergent, and says that many writers in her region are either poor or disabled. “NaNoWriMo's stance that poor and disabled writers should use AI in order to write well and succeed is disgusting. And calling critics of AI ableist and classist is truly bizarre,” she says.
Rebecca Thorne, a fantasy novelist who has participated in NaNoWriMo since 2008, when she was a teenager, took to TikTok in a viral video that calls out NaNo for ignoring the public sentiment around AI and filling their statement with “politically correct language so that you can’t argue their stance.”
Thorne met several of her closest friends at NaNo-sponsored “write-ins” and parties, and treasures those bonds to this day. She was shocked at the portion of NaNo’s statement that seemed to equate being economically disadvantaged to needing to consult an AI for help. “The whole purpose of NaNo was that you met other humans and you didn’t pay them. You exchanged work amicably,” she says. “You’re saying you don’t need humans to work on your art, but art is inherently human. We can’t rely on technology to do that work for us.”
Update: 9/4/2024, 12:30 PM EDT: This piece has been updated to clarify Rebecca Thorne's genre of fiction.
