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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 https://web.archive.org/web/20240902130810/https://www.literatureandlatte.com/nanowrimo
Scrivener is a hero product in my research/writing as an example of a software product that is designed for concrete purpose
A 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, for their next major version too.
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
that is rad as hell
here’s the interview where I learned that. https://medium.com/@timetolose/my-interview-with-keith-blount-a49c7764f26f
Official word from Scrivener here https://xcancel.com/ScrivenerApp/status/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 :)
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.
read 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.
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yes! I look forward to the longer post you mention
Statement clearly written by AI
yeah, same vibe as hate reading the jakob nielsen substack
That’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”.
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
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
NaNoWriMo did not say that ‘not writing your novel with AI is classist and ableist’.
What they did say however is almost worse:
We also want to be clear in our belief that the categorical condemnation of Artificial Intelligence has classist and ableist undertones, and that questions around the use of AI tie to questions around privilege.
So you’re classist and ableist and probably privileged if you’re against the use of AI.
Nah this is still a stupid point.
LLMs are not a writing tool at all, it’s like saying it’s classist to not be able to afford a ghostwriter.
Talent and effort are privileges and you should feel bad about them you scum
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fuck right off thanks
best bouncer ever
this way to the egress, sir
poster name checks out, and I didn’t even get to see the dumb
fyi they updated their blog post with this catch-all disclaimer in the last couple of hours
“it is simply too big to categorically endorse or not endorse”
“so we’re gonna play it safe and endorse it”
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
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.
“Because we got paid, cause we got paid, cause we got pa-aid!”
To the tune of “Then I got high” by Afroman.
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
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 nutI’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.
The prose equivalent of increasing the font size.
Quinn enters the dark and cold forest, crossing the threshold, an omnipresent sense of foreboding permeates the air, before being killed by a grue.
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.”
“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.”
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 @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.
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.
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 The rules do not address this crucial issue. https://www.bulwer-lytton.com/submit
“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
- 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
The audacity to tout classism and ableism as reasons as to why people should “get to” use LLMs for their “write a novel in a month” challenge…
Even when someone’s inability to write a novel in a month is because of their class or disability, I somehow doubt they want to let a machine write their novel for them. I mean, it’s not like NaNoWriMo is a way to put food on the table or something, right?!!
This feels like the arguments Mid journey
fellatorsfanboys were spouting a year ago (or has it been two?) on how not everyone can afford a school of fine arts 🙄Also the “banking the unbanked” arguments from crypto fanboys before that.
Also plenty of people with disabilities still find ways to write in spite of or even inspired by their unique limitations. I’ve seen very similar arguments around visual arts and loads of people with disabilities have spoken out against it.
A statement by one of the authors who has resigned from the NaNoWriMo board: No More NaNoWriMo, by Cass Morris.
“Well, but if we couldn’t commit this crime, our business couldn’t exist.” Sounds like your business shouldn’t exist, then.
so refreshing to see that from elsewhere too. same stance I hold about so much of the awful shit in the world (including an internet primarily financed through surveillance advertising), and it’d be great if more people bought in
although with how many businesses are speedrunning dumb choices (like the alexa thing etc), maybe that day comes sooner than not
Their starting aside is pretty great as well;
And I’m using that term throughout this post because it’s the commonly accepted descriptor, but we all know it’s not really artificial intelligence, right? I also want to distinguish it from actually-useful and ethically-produced technology like what gets used in the medical field to help humans examine and analyze impossibly huge datasets in the service of doing things like curing cancer. We’re talking here about the plagiarism machines like ChatGPT, everything it underpins, and all of its conceptual mirrors.
Leave no wiggle room for the AI sycophants.
Novel 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.
Could be written as Nov3
Yesss!! I love that!
NoNoNo
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
Sure, if you’d like. The term belongs to you, too.
@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.Fully in the spirit of the copyleft of the original : )
Love it!
“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 who designed a logo like that but I won’t describe that person because this is the internet and I know better
If I were unable to write a novel in a month1 but really wanted to and some smug little shit came up to me and offered to ghost write it for me, I would not be happy. How is SALAMI generated text any different?
1: I definitely can’t.
I’ve gotten xlose (~30k words) in previous nanowrimos but it looks like I’m not doing that anymore
You’re basically stealing from other people when you use LLMs without constraints, that’s more classist and ableist
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How did they manage to make a shorted version of the name more kludgy than just saying the full name?
