#dreamwidth x-post

[capricorn-0mnikorn]

I first signed up for NaNoWriMo in 21 October, 2005; I logged into NaNoWriMo 5 September, 2024, in order to delete my account.

Thanks to the entity now embracing A.I. as a "Tool."

(After looking back at my stats).

There were a couple years where I tried to do multiple challenges in a year, burning out, not participating, and then coming back.

According to my profile, there, I started 19 distinct projects, between the November marathon proper and "Camp NaNoWriMo," with a total of 605K-and-a-bit words typed out. My last registered project was in 2020. I did not reach 50K that year; I think it was about that time that I realized simply typing 50k words at breakneck speed did not lead to crafting a story I actually still wanted to tell, come December (what really kept me coming back, over and over in spite of that, was the social permission to make a pillow fort out of an imaginary world, where I could retreat from seasonal attitudinal depression, and other pressures; Pillow forts aren't meant to be permanent).

Back when I started, in 2005, NaNoWriMo was a much different beast than it is now... There were no corporate sponsors, and the only prize you could claim was a winner's T-shirt. And the social vibe was a lot more like the spontaneous writers' communities that sprung up on old school Bulletin Board Systems, IRC chat rooms (remember those?), and Usenet forums.

(All of which I miss, BTW)

[capricorn-0mnikorn]

I've gone and dug myself into an angry mood.

I clicked on a YouTube video from a channel called "Nerdy Novelist," titled Why the argument "AI is Stealing" is irrelevant.

I watched it through, hoping he'd eventually get to a better argument against AI (Curious to see if he'd have the same different arguments that I've thought up).

But nope.

His only argument was that tech companies are writing better programs, so they can create "synthetic" training data sets, so they don't have to scrape copyrighted material for their large language models. And someday, book publishers will put compensation clauses into their contracts with writers. And if the computer in your mom's basement is powerful enough, no one will be able to sue you for copyright infringement.

As an example, he said he'd soon be able to user generative AI to write an entire novel in the style of Brandon Sanderson without his permission, 'cause you can't copyright a style (and no one can pinpoint Sanderson's style anyway).

And that was the whole video.

And the comment section was filled with tech-bros talking about how the people who are against AI (especially writers* who are against AI) are fools who are just purists and elitists.

I almost replied with a rant of my own about how "Legal" is not the same as "Ethical," but decided to type all this out here, instead.

*Specifically the writers from NaNoWriMo who are complaining.

[capricorn-0mnikorn]

It’s almost NaNoWriMo (Shh! Yes, it is). And I’m feeling ‘meh.’

This is a cross-post from Dreamwidth:

So, the last time I seriously worked toward getting an actual book actually published was when I wrote my poetry chapbook, The Monsters' Rhapsody: Disability, Culture, & Identity, through Lulu.com, back in 2016.* I'm getting the itch again, to write prose, this time. Out of habit, I'm thinking of NaNoWriMo (my first NaNoWriMo was all the way back in 2005), But the idea has lost its shininess.  Maybe I'm just not in the mood for the competitive setting, anymore (even if the competition is just with myself). Maybe I just don't have a clear enough idea of what I want to write, beyond my usual genre of "Literary Fairy Tale," and I'll feel more enthusiastic as November approaches. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Anyway, that's the state of me, right now. *It's no longer available for Lulu, because they changed their printing formats / book dimensions. But I think it's still available through Amazon; I briefly thought about reformatting it, and putting out a second edition, but P.O.D. templates are a headache to format poetry, in the first place, and although I have the PDF of the book, I no longer have the original files, and so I don't have the spoons, either.