NaNoNoMo....

For those of you that have been around awhile you know that I have done NaNoWriMo a few times. I've done it straight by the rules and I've done it Denise Style where I did 50K words in November but I mixed them all around. Either straight fiction, but short stories or fiction and nonfiction just as long as words hit the page it counted. 

It's a challenge each time. Fifty thousand words in a month is a lot of words. And the time I did it all toward one story was really really difficult because I don't tend to write long stories. But that's the point of it. Get the words on the paper (or screen). Edit later. You can't edit a blank document. Get in the habit of writing. Gamify it! And, for me, there is a screen with digital confetti and stars that shows up when you post your last chunk of words and reach 50K. Big YOU WIN! sign. Yes please. More winning. 

Now some of you are like, why are you talking about NaNoWriMo in September? Isn't it usually October that you convince yourself that it wasn't THAT hard. And you weren't THAT stressed about it. And wouldn't it be kind of fun to try it again? Even though you keep swearing that you will never do it again. That you've won it a few times and that's enough. No more and I mean it this time!

Well this time I do mean it. 

I went in this morning and deleted my NaNo account. 

For those of you not into crazy writing contests you probably have no idea why. 

See, NaNoWriMo (the organization) was asked about their stance on generative AI. They started out with a "it's not on us to determine how people write" sort of what the fuck statement then moved into an "and we think it's ableist and classist for you to even talk about it being wrong."

Oh fuck you.

So ableist would be if you were conflating programs like speech to text as being the same as ChatGPT or any of the other generative AI programs. And this is not that. 

And, as Brent said when I read the statement to him, classist? Having access to generative AI programs seems more classist than not. 

A friend of mine posted about NaNo's stance and what he thought and someone on his list came in to rail against him for his take. That it was gatekeeping. And all writing is writing. And how dare he accuse people who use generative AI of not actually writing. 

Well because he's right, it's not writing. It's just not. It's fancy plagiarism. 

Because they train the AI on work that is out there, and even that phrasing makes it seem innocuous. Training, like teaching someone to do something. And in reality that's how everyone who creates learns how to create. We read, watch, look at paintings, sketches, whatever things that are already done and the first few things we create are almost always copies of those things. Then we do it more and more until we find our own style. 

AI can't find it's own style because it's not a person. It's not creative. All it is, is cut and paste from someone else's works. You enter a prompt and it gives you the words or the art, but it's not created, it's copied. And I cannot express how big of a difference that is to people who have never created something on their own. 

The people who use AI to "create" pictures or "write" stories really think they are doing something. But, let me say this again, it's just fancy plagiarism. All AI can do is find things that have already been done and rearrange them slightly. It lifts whole passages, or turns of phrase, or descriptions. And if you are a writer you know that just one sentence in a story could have taken months to craft in just the right way. And it's distinctly yours. Or it should be. 

Once you've found your voice that is. 

And that takes time, but it happens. When you read a story I've written you recognize it as mine. Even if it's a different genre than I normal write, there are still things that make you "hear" my voice. My patterns, my rhythms, my themes, and yes, my twists. Those are all hallmarks of my work. 

And in my nonfiction it's the same thing. You can hear my voice. My writing matches my speech pattern. The odd punctuation and sentence structures match my odd cadence. It's all done by choice. I want you to read something and feel like I'm telling it to you over a cup of coffee. It's taken me a few years to master, and I am really good at it.

Good enough that years ago someone I knew wrote their own blog, using a phrase they had heard me say, and aped my style so much that it was like reading something I wrote but maybe when I was drunk. I sent it to Brent, taking their name and title off of it, and asked him what he thought. He wrote back that he was a little confused when I started talking about my kids. Plural. And asked if I was tired because it was just a little off. But he thought I'd written it because it was their first attempt at writing and they had used my blogs to train on. And they lifted a phrase they heard me say to start. Not plagiarism, because they actually wrote the blog, but clearly inspired by my style. 

Now if that had been ChatGPT it would have been the blogs I had already written just cut and pasted to make a new one. Not a single original idea at all. It would have been plagiarism. It would have sounded like me, but just off a little bit. Maybe a few corrections to my grammar. Which would have changed the cadence just a bit. But it still wouldn't have been an original piece. It wouldn't have been something that they created.

That's writing with generative AI. It's not creating. It's not writing. It's making a patchwork of words out of someone else's work. And it's not going to be good in the sense that it can never surprise you with something new. Because it doesn't create, it copies. 

And I already know there are people out there that think they're creating because it was their idea that they put into the prompt. Write me a story about a woman who finds a fish in her bathtub. See? The idea was theirs so it's totally their story. No, sorry, that's not it. Ideas are a dime a dozen. See how often I grab a story prompt off the web to inspire me when nothing I'm currently working on sounds like fun. The idea is just the starting point. It's not supposed to be the only thing you contribute. That's why often when I'm doing writing prompt stories I read through dozens before something grabs my attention to write. And even more often when I post what the prompt was it can be tricky to see how I got where I went from that one prompt. And most importantly, if you give me the prompt and someone else the prompt the stories are going to be completely different. Dana and I actually did that one year as an exchange. We each had the same prompt and only one time did we even come close to each other and close is a relative term. 

I know there are already self published (and probably even some big publisher) books that have used ChatGPT or something similar. That have passages lifted out of someone else's work and just "tweaked" or even not. I'm sure there are probably entire works out on Kindle that are nothing but ChatGPT reworks. That doesn't mean it's okay to do it. 

And it absolutely should not be the stance of a group that ostensibly is there to help teach people how to be writers to say this is a perfectly good way to write your book. 

So no more November writing challenges for me. 

Or at least not ones from them. 

Maybe I'll have ChatGPT create one for me....