Re: Ansible 447 -- October 2024

On 10/1/24 12:49 PM, David Langford wrote:

RANDOM FANDOM._NaNoWriMo_  (National Novel Writing Month, every November)
was widely criticized for suggesting that it was fine to achieve the goal
of writing a novel in 30 days by having AI software churn out the words,
and indeed that it's ableist and classist to expect would-be writers to do
their own writing. Is it coincidence that they have an AI-linked firm as
sponsor? Three board members promptly resigned. [F770]

They may have been criticized for that, but it's not what they suggested. Their statement (at least in its current form) is: "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."
AI covers a lot of different tools, and many style and grammar checkers claim to use AI. I run a lot of what I write through Grammarly, so I use "tools that leverage AI." NaNoWriMo's statement is unnecessarily vague, but it's not an endorsement of "having AI software churn out the words."
--
Gary McGath    http://www.mcgath.com