NaNoWriMo drama!

[Aaron Gonzalez]

Hola, long time writing friends!

How goes it? 

Just saw this article on the Verge and thought of you all:

https://www.theverge.com/2024/9/3/24234811/nanowrimo-ai-stance-classist-ableist-criticism

Seems the AI onslaught into every facet of existence is unending. 

Thoughts on this? 

[Mauibro]

Wow, this is quite the blast from the past. Just thinking about the meaning of the acronym WOYP is a reminder of how old this list is. 😁

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[Richard Cartwright]

Hello everyone. Hope everyone is doing well. 

Frankly,  I have better things to do with my life than keep up with Nano. So I don't really have an opinion. 

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[Aaron Gonzalez]

Yeah this group started what, 20 years ago? 

Crazy. 

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[Aaron Gonzalez]

> I have better things to do with my life than keep up with Nano. So I don't really have an opinion.

I haven't don't NaNoWriMo in over 15 yrs either. But I do remember I think first hearing about it from people on this group.

Seeing it in the news just reminded me it exists and of this group so I figured I'd reach out.

I don't really have much an opinion either but do understand the confusion as to why someone would want to do a writing exercise and have an LLM generate the text for them. Sort of defeats the purpose. 

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[Brenda Wallace]

:-)

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[Aaron Gonzalez]

Brenda!  🎉 

The old crew is still around. Love it! 

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[Bert Latamore]

Wow. . ..That was a long time ago. Everything has changed so fast that I had forgotten about WOYP. Today I write on a Microsoft Surface and keep notes in Word on my phone. I use swipe writing there, which is easier on my thumbs than typing.

If I were still doing interviews I would record them and generate and transcribe with my phone so I had an accurate record.

Bert Latamore

(703) 395-5137
Freelance Writer covering the intersection between IT and business

I dream of a better world where chickens can cross the road without having their motives questioned.

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[Brenda Wallace]

oh, and BNUG lives not far from me ... well, about 8 hours drive i think.

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[Richard Cartwright]

I've been working and writing a lot since my wife passed in 2019. I just sold my 21st short story and working on volume 2 of a sword and sorcery series. Looking to do rapid release on it once the third one in the arc is done. Anyone who would like to beta read, I won't say no. :) 

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[Jeff Kirvin]

I haven't been serious about NaNo since 09, the last time I finished it (and met my late wife), but I was interested when I saw this bubble up on social media. (I'm on Threads, bet you can guess the name). I can see both sides to this debate.

Obviously, NaNo has an incentive to support AI writing tools because they're sponsored by one. And there are some concerns that your NaNo draft would be used to train that AI. But I don't think they're necessarily suggesting you use AI to draft the entire 50,000 words. They mentioned accessibility in their FAQ on this, and as someone with mild aphantasia, I'm not gonna lie, it would help to have an AI punch up my descriptive passages. I've also found AI (Google Gemini, in my case) useful in plotting and research. So it has a place as a tool, even if you write most of the words yourself.

That said, I understand the concerns of folks like Chuck Wendig who see AI as nothing more than a plagiarism machine trained on stolen work. I think that's overselling it a bit, in that outright word for work plagiarism is rare from LLMs these days and I'm not sure how a machine reading things that are publicly available online is "stealing" when me reading them isn't. But it's certainly a valid concern worth discussing. As with so many other things (like abortion here in the States) my general recommendation is that if it's against your values, no one's making you do it. But maybe don't make that decision for someone else, either.

[Richard Cartwright]

Hello Jeff!

My thoughts about AI tend to mirror yours. I see it as a tool for research.  Arguably,  PWA or Grammerly, or word processors generally could be classed as a subset of machine learning. 

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[Bert Latamore]

I am experimenting with Grammarly and seeing how it changes the writing process. As a professional nonfiction writer with 50 years of experience, I can say that the details always get you. I would go through something I wrote repeatedly, trying to check every sentence, and still miss something. With Grammarly, I should catch those things in the first draft. Writing that drift takes longer, but it eliminates all those extra reviews and helps me create a clean, optimized piece. I do not always agree with Grammarly, but I do look carefully at all its suggestions. 

Bert Latamore

(703) 395-5137
Freelance Writer covering the intersection between IT and business

I dream of a better world where chickens can cross the road without having their motives questioned.

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[Brenda Wallace]

I find grammarly homogenizes English. There's so much variety in our language from regions, socioeconomic class, ethnicity... But grammarly flags things back to an imposed idea of what is good grammar, removing perfectly good phrases with rich histories. 

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[Mauibro]

Wat you talkin bout Brenda?

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[Brenda Wallace]

yeah nah not even bro, but yous be choice, neh?

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[BigNosed UglyGuy]

Bnug checking in from about 9 hours north of Brenda (I drive slower these days.

I and my one man business survived C19(2 bouts so far) and continue to trundle along.

My 30+ year marriage ended in 2019 but after a few years in the wilderness I met and earlier this year married a wonderful woman. Nic and I have spent 3 years building a strong foundation for spending the rest of our lives together.

Most of my writing is for my leadership development work and coaching purposes these days. Have tentatively started a small microblog again but I'm not putting much there at the present time. Burt's comment about aging thumbs resonates with me and I don't do so much writing on my Android phone as I used to. When I do it's mostly on a laptop though I do have a larger Samsung tablet and Bluetooth keyboard but I find the form factor less friendly and conducive for writing than a laptop.

Have a good weekend everybody!

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[Richard Cartwright]

I use Pro Writing Aid. It's much more customizable than Grammerly

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