NaNoWrimo is falling further from greatness???

The Chatters
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With the latest news about NaNoWrimo and AI usage, many people are not pleased with any of it. Though when it comes to AI and creative arts, it leaves people with very mixed opinions on the use of AI as a whole.

So, with that in mind, if you heard about the news with NaNoWrimo revolving around AI and even what it did before that, chances are you stopped using it…maybe. If you never used AI, that is a good thing, this thread doesn’t concern you, probably. You can still do a writing challenge for yourself and/or with a small writing community, just stop using and associating with NaNo.

What are your thoughts on this incident if you have any to offer? If you don’t care, then stick around to read the comments.

My Turn:

My only issue is that because AI is getting popular along with gaining mixed opinions on its usage, it took NaNo to mention AI usage to gain attention to people. It’s interesting because NaNo wasn’t great before AI came into the picture, I am talking about the forums having to be shut down because of pedophilia child grooming thing. Not many people mention that, because most people who used NaNo didn’t know about that. Even if they did and kept using it, the point is NaNo was allowing pedophiles to mess with children, yet when it comes to AI, it’s what matters to people the most. It’s strange how that works. Even when the site shut down the forums, people still used it NaNo as if nothing bad happened. I see it as “well, I don’t use the forums, so I don’t care” for most people, though not all of them felt this way. Now, with AI coming into play, yeah it matters now. You’ve had to have been pretty out of the loop to not know what was happening. So, I find it interesting that NaNo’s AI usage is what really pisses most people off.

I don’t know, but humans are weird, have been weird, and continue to become weird as time moves forward. Anyway, I stopped using it because I got bored and uninterested. I don’t plan to use it in the future or ever.

Some people hate the use of AI, while others see it as beneficial if you use it the correct way. This is an argument that will never stop until AI is gone forever, and society does better to help people.

All in all, tell me your thoughts?
If I am going to post down links so that you can be better familiar.

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@Akje
@alenatenjo
@TheTigerWriter
@NatureLover40
@Xelyn_Craft
@JojoDahlia
@Churro
@MatthewJH
@SecretDurham
@EmiliaFrost

I want all of your opinions. You are allowed to speak freely and respectfully. Doesn’t matter if you were using it or never did or did at a point, just give me your thoughts…all of them!

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I don’t think anyone left NaNo over either incident any more than people left Twitter when Elon Musk bought it. Everyone says they’re going to flounce, but they never do.

I don’t think the AI thing made people madder than the pedo thing, but NaNo shut down the forums after the pedo incident so it’s not possible for people to vent there about it anymore. At the time, those forums were very active with angry users calling out the moderator and yelling at the staff, and I think that’s why HQ paused the forums so it’s just read-only now. I haven’t checked there lately, but I assume it’s still read-only.

As for the AI thing, there’s been a lot less complaint about it from what I’ve seen, but this AI hate has been smoldering for years now. My own AI hatred has been simmering at least as far back as when Amazon first got deluged with fake books years ago by greedy, selfish a**holes trying to get rich by flooding Amazon and other outlets with AI-generated books. AI by design plagiarizes other works, and those books make our own real books harder for customers to find, so they’re sabotaging us for their own benefit. Not to mention, those AI books are terrible, and they’re giving self-published books a bad name, which we’ve all been trying to get out from under for decades now anyway. A lot of readers have the idea that if you’re self-published, it’s because your work isn’t good enough to be published by a legit publisher, when the reality is that publishing houses simply aren’t interested in anything that isn’t trendy and popular already. Hence their insistence on recent comp titles. Your book isn’t going to have recent comp titles if it isn’t following a trend. ¯\_(ﭢ)_/¯

So for NaNo to encourage its users to plagiarize other writers because one of their sponsors uses AI is pretty sad all on its own. For them to say disabled people can’t write unless they use AI makes it even worse, and I love that disabled writers are coming out and telling NaNo HQ that this is insulting.

Personally I’m going to use the NaNo site in November, though. I always use it to track my book’s progress and win badges for the month. It’s also good practice to design a book cover, pull an excerpt and write a book description for the project page.

So are you going to use the NaNo site this year? __〆(．．)

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True, very true.

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Nah, I’ll keep writing without it.

Though it is on a smaller scale, in some ways people are making it a very big thing.

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I never used NaNo to begin with. It was never my thing. I’m against generative AI being used for anything except inspiration tho, because it’s highly unethical and plagiarism to use it for creative works. So, the fact they encouraged people to use it in their writing makes me even less inclined to use NaNo.

As for the pedophilia thing, all sorts of social media has been used for child grooming. It doesn’t mean the social media site is to blame. It means the pedophile is to blame. As long as they took action to stop it (closing their forums, I’m assuming) you can’t really hold them responsible. If they were encouraging it, that would be one thing. I’ll be all sorts of angry if that is the case. But otherwise it’s just some jackass using the forum incorrectly and illegally. You blame the one who did it, not the site they used, which, in a way could be seen as another victim of the person misusing it, and I’m not into victim blaming. Granted, I don’t actually know much about the circumstances around that, so I might just be talking out my ass here.

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Would you ever do your very own version of NaNo or no?

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The whole point of NaNo is to impose a deadline on a writing project, and a strict one at that. For me, that is too much pressure and does the opposite of motivate me. It makes me feel overwhelmed and then I don’t write at all. So, no, I would not.

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I feel you on that.

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So, I’ve always been a strong anti AI person. But seeing as its a free service I don’t really feel like boycotting it if I do desire to use it will achieve much? Given they don’t change the actual way the website works enough it doesn’t give me what i need, or they start asking for money for it. I do enjoy the people I’ve met in the past and the sense of community aligned with the same goals. I have in the past, granted when I had more time, found the deadlines personally useful for keeping me accountable.

I do disagree, but a few hard takes aren’t going to hurt my feelings towards using it.

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I find all of this Gen AI in creative fields discourse very boring and cyclical, one side yelling at the other ignoring them. But there is a part of me that feels massively entertained by all this!

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I’ve known of NanoWrimo’s existence for a while. Never used it though. Only learned of their forums after they were closed. So overall opinion of NanoWrimo is ‘meh’, I guess.

I experimented with using AI (Claude-3 Opus) to help with drafting and concepts for chapters. But Claude-3 Opus was so censored, repetitive, and super saiyan church lady level moralising about 80% of the outputs were useless…and that’s when it decided to follow the prompt requirements and avoided breaking my characters (too much)…Anyway, I did not renew my monthly Claude subscription. I’m moderately confident Hemingway would nuke Anthropic’s data centers just out of frustration and spite.

As for AI in general. It’s not going away anytime soon. Earlier this year NVIDIA (who make the best AI processor units) was valued as a trillion-dollar company,* and there’s probably an equal or greater level of investment in AI development globally.

There is one piece of good news for the anti-AI crowd. OpenAI, who previously got into trouble with plagiarism accusations, is now viewed as mid-level AI company. There are better alternatives, even open-source / free ones (if you have a super computer for a desktop), around the Internets. For OpenAI to regain their previous market dominance, they may need to release an AGI-lite variant of GPT-5 before someone else does (a very impatient hint-hint, dear OpenAI).

Two relevant videos:

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From what you are telling me, everyone who hates AI will be appeased if and when Open AI closes?

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They will have a small victory if that happens. But, short of a global economic crash or of Taiwan’s microchip manufactures being destroyed, the odds of AI fading away in the near future are not in the anti-AI camp’s favour.

I’ve heard about Apple and IBM (or Microsoft?) developing their own AI hardware and software to compete with NVIDIA. Once other tech giants reach NVIDIA’s quality and scale of production, it’s game-set-match to AI.

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I don’t do NaNoWriMo :sweat_smile:

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I just want this drama to end and everyone start caring about something else…

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Then they will obsess over something else that is annoying.
Humans are strange creatures.

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Oh my gosh, I’ve been seeing so much about this lately.

I’ve seen people on Instagram saying they’re going to leave NaNo for good or they’re never going to do a 50k NaNo ever again… Or they’re going to start their own movement, so everyone come and join! (the movement is: leave NaNo and lets have a monthly writing challenge (which is not a new thing (and which they could have started without the NaNo controversy))).

No one is stopping anyone from doing a 50k-a-month challenge. I think it’s so weird that some IG people think doing a 50k challenge is somehow isolated and only a NaNo thing. Like, you wanna challenge yourself to write 50k in a month, get stats updates, and chat with friends about it? Go on then. Do it. Learn Excel or something. Or just write down your word count on a memo pad each day. Idk. Make it work.

Just like NaNo opened a can of worms and dug itself into a deep hole talking about their stance on AI, FB writing groups opened a can of worms and are digging themselves into the deepest holes possible after talking about their AI stances. And, a problem surfaces: no one makes it clear what they mean by “AI” and they also don’t realize (in their heated debate mind state) that they need to make it clear.

NaNo might mean this specific type of AI, but you or I reading it would interpret it as this or that specific AI. Then some whole other stranger will pop in and automatically be offended because they’re thinking of yet another specific AI thing.

I think of ChatGPT or Midjourney. Others think of the speech-to-text devices that help them in their daily lives. What is NaNo thinking of when they say AI? What are the FB writing groups thinking of? Nobody knows and that brings up so much toxic debate in the comments.

I never participate in those debates, but I do read them, and there are always people that “respectfully disagree” all over the place with the admins and each other. It’s a trend these days to “respectfully disagree” in writing groups.

As for NaNo, I haven’t decided if I’ll do it, and this is solely based on my personal schedule. I freely sign up and freely participate in a free challenge. I’m not giving them anything but being another user on a website that helps motivate me to write every day during November.

Obviously, I’ve had lots of thoughts on this :sweat_smile:

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Well, last night (Australia time) OpenAI released a series of AI software called o1. Not AGI level yet, but probably better than anything else in the marketplace (depending on the use-cases). I’m beginning to think OpenAI is reluctant to release any software with the name GPT-5 because the world’s AI professionals, enthusiasts, and general onlookers expect GPT-5 to be AGI by another name. If GPT-5 fails to perform at that level then OpenAI could lose a lot (perhaps a terminal amount) of market credibility…all that hype turns out to be hot air…

How about self-contained humanoid robots entering the (job) marketplace, at the production rate of roughly a million units a year?

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For me, the real question is how well companies wanting to cut costs can maintain their robot workers. Human greed is a big threat, in my opinion.

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