#you don't get to use 'Disabled People' as a shield for your shitty AI sponsor!!!!!!

[walks-the-ages]

Nanowrimo made a half-assed, desperate ""apology"" post

Full text, for when they inevitably try to edit it; as of right now it's August 6th, 2024, around 5:30pm est.

A Note to Our Community About our Comments on AI – September 2024 To the NaNoWriMo Community: In early August, debates about AI on our social media channels became vitriolic. It was clear that the intimidation and harassment we witnessed were causing harm within our community of writers. The FAQs we crafted last week were written to curtail those behaviors. We wanted to send a clear signal that NaNoWriMo spaces would not be used to bully or delegitimize other writers. This was consistent with our May 2024 statement, which named a lack of civility in NaNoWriMo spaces as a longstanding concern. Taking a position of neutrality was not an abandonment of writers’ legitimate concerns about AI. It was an acknowledgment that NaNoWriMo can’t maintain a civil, inclusive community if we allow selective intolerance. We absolutely believe that AI must be discussed and that its ethical use must be advocated-for. What we don’t believe is that NaNoWriMo belongs at the forefront of that conversation. That debate should continue to thrive within the greater writing community as technologies continue to evolve. We apologize that our original message was unclear and seemingly random. Our note on ableism and classism was rooted in the desire to point out that, for people in certain circumstances, some forms of AI can be life-changing. We certainly don’t believe those with concerns about AI to be classist or ableist. Not being more careful about our wording was a bad decision on our part. Our Mission is about providing encouragement to writers and cheering them on as they progress toward their goals. That remains our primary focus. In the future, we will be more transparent about the issues that we are trying to address with any messaging we provide. Finally, we recognize that some members of our community have other questions and concerns that go beyond general context for our comments. We don’t think we can address all of these in a single communication. Additional context here is that we are a very small team (including our Interim Executive Director, who is a volunteer). We want to take the time to read through your letters with the care, attention, and concern they deserve. Please expect more in the coming weeks.  In partnership, The NaNoWriMo Team

I sincerely hope their other sponsors bail ship and leave them to flounder at this point lmao. There is no going back from "if you criticize generative AI you're just ableist classist and racist".

They've also once again edited their "What Is Nanowrimo's Stance on AI?" post:

New text, in full; looks like it was updated sometime late yesterday or early today (August 6th 2024):

What is NaNoWriMo's position on Artificial Intelligence (AI)? 13 hours ago -Updated Not yet followed by anyone

NaNoWriMo neither explicitly supports nor condemns any approach to writing, including the use of tools that  leverage AI. We recognize that harm has been done to the writing and creative communities at the hands of bad actors in the generative AI space, and that the ethical questions and risks posed by some aspects of this technology are real. The fact that AI is a large, complex technology category (which encompasses both non-generative and generative AI, applied in a range of ways to a range of uses) contributes to our belief that AI is simply too big and too varied to categorically support or condemn. NaNoWriMo's mission is to "provide the structure, community, and encouragement to help people use their voices, achieve creative goals, and build new worlds—on and off the page." We fulfill our mission by supporting the humans doing the writing. Please see this related post that speaks to our overall position on nondiscrimination with respect to approaches to creativity, writer's resources, and personal choice.  We made mistakes in our initial expression of this position. We speak to those mistakes in this letter to our community, and we've simplified the language on this page to reflect our core position. 

If you're wondering why Nano's posting all these non-apologies, its because they started this debacle with seven huge sponsors.

Over the course of the last three days, they've gone down to four.

They have literally lost about half their sponsors because of their support of generative ai.

And, as you can see in the "apologies" above, they're still defending their AI stance, by now claiming that their stance is because they were defending poor, hapless AI users from a horde of harassment and bullying from all sides, and they're not a platform that condones bullying! totally! (sarcasm).

[walks-the-ages]

Sorry peeps, but if you're genuinely out here trying to defend generative Ai because you think anyone against it is "ableist" sorry not sorry you're not just getting unfollowed you're getting fully blocked along with the OP and who you reblogged it from lmao.

"most people angry about Nanowrimo allowing AI are just being loudly ableist!!! Generative Ai is a great tool for disabled people!! Everyone should be able to use it!"

Hmm, sorry, maybe you need to curate your dash some more like I just did by blocking you, but literally the ONLY people I've seen talking about Nanowrimo's AI stance are people who are actually disabled themselves who are pointing out how fucking shitty it is for Nanowrimo to defend themselves and their sponsor using AI (and possibly scraping your works to further train their AI) By using ~Disabled People~ in concept as a shield against criticism.

Many, many people have posts on here about how they are physically or mentally disabled and they would absolutely hate having someone belittle them by telling them the only way they can accomplish something creative like writing a novel is to have a Computer spit nonsense out into a word document, or generate a "masterpiece" digital image for them from a few words typed in...

Like.

If you actually care about disabled people, you wouldn't be advocating for generative AI to be used to erase their creativity by just letting a computer churn out crap.

If you can type in a prompt on an AI generator, you can type in a word processor to write your story.

Can't physically type at all?

Use speech to text,

or do an audio recording of your novel, and have someone transcribe it,

or use actual existing Closed Caption technology to transcribe it for you!

These are all accessible technology options that actually help disabled people be creative, not just tell an AI generator "hey write me a book about x"

Disabled people have been authors and artists for millennia.

Stephen Hawking used a combination of Predictive Text, eye-control cursors, and an infrared sensor mounted on his glasses that would detect if he was tensing or relaxing the muscles in his cheek, allowing him to scroll a virtual keyboard.

Somehow, I don't think the people championing generative AI actually care about "disabled people" when they try to insist that typing a prompt into a generator and having it churn out random slop is the solution to 'allowing disabled people to be creative' instead of actually giving them the various technology and accessibility tools that have been a thing for at least 25 years, like:

Eye-tracking software that allows you to type or paint on a computer screen (this is now at the point where people can play online video games with this software!)

Having any kind of smart phone set up with speech to text and a word processing app like Google Docs or a notepad app

Using basic sound recording apps to dictate your novel for later transcription

Using other body parts than your hands (or using prosthetics) to hold paint brushes, pens, markers, digital stylus, computer mouse, etc to make art with.

And so much more!

The real ableism here is when pro-AI bros try to insist that Disabled People, categorically, are incapable of being creative and accomplishing anything without a computer doing all the work for them by generating things based on millions of stolen works, and the complete erasure of all of the disabled artists who are here *now* and existed in the past, acting like they do not and never existed, all so that rich white ai bros can continue to flood reddit with "super cool badass art I just made" which is a nonsense amalgamation, and throw tantrums when artists start using programs like Glaze and Nightshade in an attempt to protect their art from those same predatory ai tech bros.

Technology is meant to help humans be creative, not steal our works and livelyhood by replacing writers and artists entirely, because all some rich guy has to do now is type in a prompt.