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David Gerard @awful.systems

NaNoWriMo gets AI sponsor, says not writing your novel with AI is ‘classist and ableist’

95 comments

  • I joined a writing meetup here in Amsterdam which gathers every week in a bar to write, to talk about their writing, to bounce ideas, etc. I kinda got tired of going because there were a worrying number of people using chatgpt to generate ideas. I was the only one trying to write non-fiction, and most of what I was writing would be crit of tech (sometimes genAI) so talking about my writing was always fun. But nonetheless, their use of chatgpt seemed extra weird because we were there, together, to write and support each other, for free.

    It's strange to use solidarity, support, and just general helpfulness from others as an explanation for how AI opens writing up to classes or abilities when that's probably one of the top things that social media (and pre-social media social media) gave us on the internet.

    anyway..

  • From the second reddit post

    But when I say that being told that everything I’d set up didn’t count, that broke me. I had worked so hard, literally from the fucking hospital, to be told that it didn’t count. That the thing that I had set up as an accommodation for disabled or immunocompromised didn’t count

    The current Executive Director is the board member that works under a pen name and an AI picture. ... had signed tax documents under said pen name.

    Moderator Y starts parroting on the forums that they have it on "good authority" that Letitia (who is Black) is a diversity hire

    All very ironic

  • so I clicked through to the barely veiled advertisement on NaNoWriMo’s blog:

    Rephrase by ProWritingAid is a brand-new feature meant for writers like you. You can highlight any sentence, click Rephrase, and generate a new sentence. Shorten or lengthen a sentence, change the tone to formal or informal, or add sensory detail.

    Here’s a boring sentence I wrote: “Quinn entered the dark and cold forest.”

    And here’s a sentence Rephrase gave me: “Quinn shivered as he stepped into the cold, dark forest, the air thick with the scent of damp earth.”

    I can build off that! Now I’m more excited to write this scene that was feeling bland.

    like fuck me that’s somehow even more bland, but it’s longer so you’re closer to that 50,000 words you need to write so you can nut

    I’m not a particularly good writer, but here’s some advice my human brain hallucinated without burning down a rainforest:

    • nobody fucking “steps into” a forest, what the fuck is that? if it’s an important place, describe it geographically. describe how the atmosphere and scenery change as Quinn approaches the forest. and since this is NaNoWriMo and you’re in a hurry, you can go with a placeholder like // TODO: sober up and do some basic research on what forests and their surrounding areas are usually like for authenticity, lorem ipsum Deloris shrdlu
    • this fucker started shivering? is he naked? is the forest frozen in a way the surrounding area isn’t? if so maybe write that cause it sounds more interesting than this bland shit.
    • maybe I live in a particularly dry place, but my brain isn’t rendering “the scent of damp earth” or why it’d sit thick in the air. I don’t think that’s what the forests I’ve been in smell like though — they smell like trees looking to fuck. but is Quinn the type of character who’d even give a fuck about any of this? maybe he lives in the forest and none of these smells are new. maybe he’s currently half a foot tall so the smell of the damp earth’s very relevant to him. the LLM doesn’t know so it filled in the blandest shit possible instead!

    • also "quinn entered the dark and cold forest" is fine. sentences aren't boring, stories are.

      • right! regardless of anything else, the story didn’t benefit from the LLM adding false detail to it. the LLM just made it longer for no reason other than to hit a word count.

    • Quinn enters the dark and cold forest, crossing the threshold, an omnipresent sense of foreboding permeates the air, before being killed by a grue.

    • @self @dgerard and the rewrite makes the protagonist specifically male with "he".

    • Off the top of my head:

      "Quinn entered the dark and cold forest. His knife was dripping blood. He was whistling, off-key."

      • "Quinn entered the dark and cold forest. Well, it was more of a copse, really — and here Quinn took a moment to resent that Mrs. Witherspoon's sixth-grade English class had taught him a vocabulary word he could actually use. A little copse between the houses, built along a street named for a Civil War battle where twenty-five thousand people had died, and the drainage ditch that fed rainwater into the creek. But as forests go, it would have to do. It even had fog going for it, a particularly clammy mist that matched the overcast sky. The mud was frozen beneath his sneakers. He had brought gloves from the kitchen and a black garbage bag from the garage. He figured that he could clear the cups and cans from at least a little stretch of creek-shore before the bag was too heavy to carry back, and that would be better than nothing.

        "At the house, he knew, his parents were still fighting.

        "At least, he thought, they made it to the day after Christmas."

      • I spent a good chunk of my 20s obsessed with building a co-writing web platform I called PlotPlant. I really want to riff off what you did here, but I'm scared it will reignite my interest in the project and I'll just add to the pile of unfinished work

    • @self @dgerard
      I've stepped into a forest, carefully, because there was a barb-wire fence around it. No smell of damp earth, because it was the dry season, and not cold. Lots of spider webs hanging under the trees, though.

    • @self
      I deleted my account this year because of all the shady things going on there. Glad it was the right decision. How can a writing platform promote this shite?

      I don't want to read books written by LLM. I hope using LLM without disclosing it will be seen as fraud.

      @dgerard

    • @self @cstross @dgerard maybe I live in a particularly dry place, but my brain isn’t rendering “the scent of damp earth” or why it’d sit thick in the air.

      It's somewhat similar to petrichor, but not quite. Earthen cellars & crawlspaces in high-humidity have something comparable. One place I've lived in with no proper basement kept the smell going for days after it rained enough or otherwise had high-enough humidity.

    • now even more bland, but it’s longer so you’re closer to that 50,000 words you need to write so you can nut

      nanowrinonutnovember

    • @self @cstross But can I win the Bulwer-Lytton prize if my sentence is AI-aided?

  • So it's called the National Novel Writing Month, but like what nation? Should non-US writers have their own ones?

    Also I just saw they have a logo and it's an insult to heraldry.

    • I have a mental image of the person who designed a logo like that but I won't describe that person because this is the internet and I know better

  • You’re basically stealing from other people when you use LLMs without constraints, that’s more classist and ableist

  • @dgerard Not sure where else to post this, but I'll post it here since this may be related to this thread. Either your account is directly banned on Hachyderm now, or circumstances.run has been defederated. Not sure how all that works, but here's a screenshot of what your account looks like from a Hachyderm POV.

    In case this doesn't translate to Lemmy, it says your account is suspended.

    • thanks for the notice! I’ll make sure David sees this and do some poking around as well. by any chance, were you able to see if any other circumstances.run accounts show the same error?

      • @self I don't think I follow anyone else on circumustances.run. If you have one handy, would you post another account name from that instance and I'll take a look?

    • eh, their loss, my account is where it's at for quality tech ranting. hachyderm is a bit like programming.dev but for mastodon.

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