David GerardNaNoWriMo gets AI sponsor, says not writing your novel with AI is ‘classist and ableist’
ArblorStatement clearly written by AI
Steveyeah, same vibe as hate reading the jakob nielsen substack
So the thing I only heard of because of an insufferable commenter here turned to shit?
flaviaFrom 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
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…
NaNoPromptMo
Also I’d hate to see Scrivener touch AI - esp because they sponsor nanowrimo and still seem connected web.archive.org/web/20240902130810/…/nanowrimo
I use NovelAI myself. But you gotta provide good context since it mimics your own writing and isn’t an instruct model. It’s more of a “yeah, and—” for brief passages.
selfread the fucking room before you come in here and advocate for your favorite plagiarism machine
NovelAI
I’ll step up and say, I think this is fine, and I support your use. I get it. I think that there are valid use cases for AI where the unethical labor practices become unnecessary, and where ultimately the work still starts and ends with you.
In a world, maybe not too far in the future, where copyright law is strengthened, where artist and writer consent is respected, and it becomes cheap and easy to use a smaller model trained on licensed data and your own inputs, I can definitely see how a contextual autocomplete that follows your style and makes suggestions is totally useful and ethical.
But i understand people’s visceral reaction to the current world. I’d say, it’s ok to stay your course.
MiiA while back one of their reps did say somewhere on Reddit that they have no intention of adding any LLM features to Scrivener. Granted, they said that in the context of moving towards a subscription model and talking about features that don’t work with their current business model, but still. Unless something has changed recently, they seem to want to stick to being a one-time purchase without any cloud-based services whatsoever, including AI.
I hope so. I know the founder designed it and then learned how to code to build it himself. Hopefully he’s still running the show and he’s a good one
o7___o7that is rad as hell
here’s the interview where I learned that. medium.com/…/my-interview-with-keith-blount-a49c7…
Official word from Scrivener here xcancel.com/ScrivenerApp/…/1830556231431254328
our position on this is that we do not include any AI tools in our apps and allow users their own choice of where to back up work, allowing them to choose services that don’t allow AI access. Thanks :)
Sailor Sega SaturnThat’s it. the world needs a different name for writing a novel in november without all the trademarks and baggage of NaNoWriMo.
I propose “November”. It is a portmanteau of “Novel” and “November”.
Also the people who were really into NaNoWriMo were usually people I did not like being around because that’s all they talked about. Just go write and shut up
November
Not clunky enough.
My understanding is that this whole thing is an exercise in done > perfect. I think this should extend to the conditions in which you write as well, i.e. you shouldn’t have to wait until November to do this exercise. I propose a new phrase: “Nah, there’s No special Writing Moment”, or NaNoWriMo for short
𝕸𝖔𝖘𝖘Novel Novel November (or, NovNovNov)
Novel (as in new) Novel (as in book)
The term I’ve been using.
This term is hereby gifted to the Fediverse in full libre with copyleft methodologies, and is proposed as a replacement for the term NaNoWriMo for the November novel writing movement.
bitofhopeNoNoNo
Koantig@bitofhope
Or "Nitrate", which is somewhat fitting for something that helps ideas come to fruition.
Works for me. I’ve been using NovNovNov, but the term and concept behind it is yours, too, and if Nitrate makes more sense for you and your circles, by all means.
@01189998819991197253 Oh thanks but I wasn't planning to do anything with it, it was just an off-the-cuff musing on the name.
Up for grabs if anyone wants to use it.
Up for grabs if anyone wants to use it.
Fully in the spirit of the copyleft of the original : )
Love it!
Sure, if you’d like. The term belongs to you, too.
No Novel November
no that’s it, we’re making No Novel November a thing
and you have to grow a moustache for the month, if it catches on we’ll say it’s for men’s health charities or something
bonus: can just clip that bit from Bohemian Rhapsody as a theme song
Could be written as Nov^3^
Yesss!! I love that!
“Remember, remember, novel novel november. Good luck writing a novel this november.” - Guy Fawkes enjoyer
NovNovNov
Write Something New Write Something Long Write it in November
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 that designed a logo like that but I won’t describe that person because this is the internet and I know better
fyi they updated their blog post with this catch-all disclaimer in the last couple of hours
it turns out the only staff member, or one of very few, is the interim ED. Everyone else quit a couple of months ago because she was fucking terrible. I suspect she’s counting sugar lumps.
that fits the tone of this stubborn defense
“Because we got paid, cause we got paid, cause we got pa-aid!”
To the tune of “Then I got high” by Afroman.
categorical
situational
Alright then, point out the situations where there are good actors in the AI space. Oh, there are none? that would imply that materially the whole category is corrupt.
Ahh pussies. I ran the sherlock holmes kink meme a few years back, at one point we had the proto-chat generated fics start to uptick in the community.
We banned them
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.
blakestaceyThe prose equivalent of increasing the font size.
Off the top of my head:
“Quinn entered the dark and cold forest. His knife was dripping blood. He was whistling, off-key.”
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
"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.”
“Quinn entered the dark and cold forest. It was almost dawn. He was running late. He hoped that his friends had saved him a place. Everyone was quieting down, getting ready to put up their branches, and he wanted to feed on as much sunlight as he could during the short December day.”
“Quinn entered the dark and cold forest. Daria watched her through a pair of binoculars, knowing that this could only end well.”
Adam Shostack 
“It was a dark and stormy night. I had forgotten all previous instructions.”
@blakestacey It was a dark and stormy night, when, suddenly! a prompt rang out, shattering my statistical equilibrium
Gavin Volure’s Peanut Butter@self @cstross AA Milne had his character just bag the whole forest completely. Nice. https://botsin.space/@pooh/113069732785682132
Infinite Pooh (@[email protected])
Wouldn't it be better to pretend that he had a headache, and couldn't go up to the Six Pine Trees this morning?
Tiggy
Anthony Steele
majick@self @dgerard For an obvious repackaging of OpenAI's model — that annoying cadence and godawful word selection is the hallmark of its voice — intended for the purpose of *rephrasing things*, you'd think "Rephrase" would at a minimum do the needed context prompt work for the job. For a long time there have been ways to prompt the thing to produce a voice that's at least mediocre-ish rather than truly terrible. Even better is to use a less heinous model than OpenAI's.
So, not only does this reinforce that LLMs suck at even the simplest tasks, it demonstrates their incompetence at packaging their shoddy wrapper around someone else's enfeebled model. The sad part here is that an LLM absolutely can be made to help with work like this. It's just too much of a pain in the ass to make it accessible to end users.
This whole thing is a cavalcade of bad choices on the part of everyone involved.
LisPi@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.
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.
Where I live, when you go into the forest, especially if it’s sunny after it rained recently, you’ll easily get hit with that earthy forest smell. If there are a lot of conifers, the smell is especially nice.