You ever have one of those mornings where you wake up, casually decide to blast your eyeballs with some blue light courtesy of your phone in order to wake up more quickly, and then immediately regret every decision you’ve made in the short time you’ve been conscious because the first thing your brain comprehends in the day is some completely unexpected and emotionally destructive news? That was me on Labor Day, when I woke up and learned that the organization behind National Novel Writing Month had not only decided to officially allow LLMs and “AI writing tools” to be legitimate sources of text for their various month-long writing events but also tried to get ahead of anyone calling them on this bullshit by saying in the same statement that not allowing LLMs and these “writing aids” is both classist and ableist. Which is also bullshit. The whole thing is complete and utter bullshit. How the hell does an organization built around the idea of encouraging people to write not only allow text that wasn’t written (no LLM writes text, it generates a complex version of autocomplete) but allows it using tools built off of stolen writing? And, to top it all off, it turns out that a likely reason they’re taking this stance is that one of their major sponsors for the year is one of those now-allowed “AI writing aid” tools! One of the tolls built from ChatGPT and an ever-increasing amount of stolen work! It’s absolutely staggering.

Needless to say, I saw the news right as it was going viral and writers were starting to publicly break with the organization. People who had authored encouragement messages, who had come up with prompts or exercises, or who had allowed NaNoWriMo to drop their names in its advertising and information pages all begun to break ties with the organization and ask that it remove all of their information from its site. Sure, over the time since then, NaNoWriMo has walked back some of their statements and gotten rid of some of the most inflammatory of the text, but they’re still sponsored by a plagiarism machine company and I have absolutely zero trust that they’ll do literally anything to actually address this problem. I mean, in addition to a bunch of weird syntax and grammar issues in the post that made it pretty clear it’d been written by an LLM and sparingly edited (if it was edited at all), it was also just factually wrong. No one who has access to an LLM that will generate an entire novel for them doesn’t have access to some kind of word processor. No one who has a disability that prevents them from writing is going to be using an LLM to generate text. All of their given reasons for allowing this are petty, ill-conceived bullshit and clearly picked to deter people from trying to fault them for this choice. Which just goes to show that whoever has been making these decisions doesn’t understand their userbase at all since poor or struggling artists are a huge demographic (after all, all the rich people who want to write a novel can just do that) and using disabled people as an excuse to put LLMs into everything is something that disabled people everywhere have been speaking out against since the days of those shitty generated profile pictures that started showing up on Facebook in late 2022. Truly, this was the sort of thing that only an interim Master of Business Administration CEO brought in from the Charity’s Board could conceive of.

To be completely frank, after all of the scandals of 2023, I was already on the fence about participating again. I only caught wind of these scandals after the end of NaNoWriMo (the month) in 2023 and I never looked up the details because it involved minors being groomed by group administrators and misbehaving volunteers and employees. I’ve learned not to look up things that are only going to make me angry in a way that can’t, by definition, ever be productive, so I was content to exist with that level of detail and wait to see what NaNoWriMo (the organization) would do in response. I hadn’t really planned on keeping up with the goings-on of the organization and did nothing to actively seek it out, but what word I’d heard from various corners of the internet was pretty pessimistic even before this latest LLM debacle, so I’d been steeling myself for spending some time this month and next figuring out what, exactly, had happened and what, exactly, had been done about it so I could see if my morals and ethics squared with what this organization I used to routinely support was doing. Which means that the only good to come out of this latest debacle is that I don’t have to look all that up. Turns out that making up my mind was pretty easy.

I deleted my account with little fanfare. I made sure all my writer friends who still occasionally dabbled in the NaNoWriMo month and organization knew about what was going, told them I planned to delete my account, and then deleted it. It sucked, but I’ve made more emotionally difficult decisions based on weaker principles and I am NEVER going to support an organization that deals with LLMs and the companies that make these environmentally destructive plagiarism algorithms, to say nothing of mishandling their responsibility to their underage users. Which is why my blog is still going to move at some point this fall. Probably during the week of US Thanksgiving, since I usually take that whole week off. WordPress’ owner, Automattic, still sucks, and I’m willing to throw away everything I’ve built here (if it comes to that, since I’m not sure how much will transfer from one WordPress (.com) site to a WordPress (.org) site hosted elsewhere. Or what will survive transferring to something new entirely… I really need to figure that out. Alas, all of the stress from last weekend and my continued inability to sleep without back pain has me unable to properly focus for more than a couple minutes at a time. Someday, I’ll have the time and energy to look this stuff up. I’ve certainly followed enough people who have already left WordPress behind that I should be able to figure out something that works well for people.

Anyway, my final thought is that NaNoWriMo (the organization) can get fucked and that you don’t need a special month to write a bunch. You can create a writing circle with anyone you like and write a whole bunch any time you want. Yeah, I know that part of the fun is doing it with a bunch of people and watching that little bar or graph go up as you log your daily writing, but you can buy large sheets of paper and make your own graph! Also, I’m sure that some kind of alternative will show up eventually [even if the website I thought it might show up on, as of editing this, isn’t going to be around by then] and you’ll be able to find new ways to build community. Probably. It’s not like we’ve seen online communities shrink and contract with each passing month as the enshitification of the internet continues driving off everyone who has any kind of offline life…