Last spring, a graduate student in social anthropology--let's call him Chris--sat down at his laptop and asked ChatGPT for help with a writing assignment. He pasted a few thousand words, a mix of rough summaries and jotted-down bullet points, into the text box that serves as ChatGPT's interface. "Here's my entire exam," he wrote. "Don't edit it, I will tell you what to do after you've read it." Chris was tackling a difficult paper about perspectivism, which is the anthropological principle that one's perspective inevitably shapes the observations one makes and the knowledge one acquires.

Please spare a thought for artificial intelligence (AI). It may not have feelings yet but, if it did, it would feel devastated by all the nasty things people are saying about it. All it's trying to do is take our jobs and potentially destroy the world and people can't stop being mean. Exhibit one: a recent controversy with the organisation that runs National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), a yearly challenge to produce a manuscript in a month. In a recent statement, NaNoWriMo wrote that it doesn't explicitly support or condemn any approach to writing, "including the use of AI". Further: "The categorical condemnation of artificial intelligence has classist and ableist undertones … questions around the use of AI tie to questions around privilege."

It was an emotionally dark and stormy night in 2020 when I had the urge to write a novel. I'd been having panic attacks. To work through it, I decided to write a novel about an isolated mom and a monster in the woods, along with therapy. So that November, I participated in National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), which is also a nonprofit organization that encourages creative writing through a variety of events, including its most famous and titular program where participants attempt to write a complete novel (or 50,000 words) in the month of November. I loved the "flow state" of writing that came about as a result of participating.

With a name that sounds like something a parent would slowly mouth to their infant, NaNoWriMo is an annual "challenge" in which many thousands of seemingly well-adjusted people decide to write a novel in a month. "Do I need something special to write a novel?" the nonprofit that puts on this exquisite torture reasonably asks on its website. National Novel Writing Month began in 1999 with 21 participants, and now nearly half a million take part every November. The event is also the name of the organization that gamifies the exercise, hosting participants on its online platform. To "win" NaNoWriMo, you need to produce a minimum of 50,000 words in a month (about the length of The Great Gatsby)--or 1,667 words a day, a number, NaNoWriMo tells us, that "scientists have determined to be the perfect amount to boost your creativity."

National Novel Writing Month has long been known for its quirky, homegrown approach to creativity: Write a novel during the month of November! But last Friday, the 25-year-old nonprofit, known as NaNoWriMo for short, shocked many in the writing community when it published a controversial statement detailing its position on AI. In it, NaNoWriMo asserted that the "categorical condemnation" of artificial intelligence has "classist and ableist undertones." The statement went viral on social media over the weekend, drawing fire from longtime participants and well-known authors, some of whom credit the completion of their first novels to the organization. Four members of NaNoWriMo's writers board, including science fiction/fantasy writer Daniel José Older and fantasy writer Cass Morris, have now publicly stepped down from their roles in response.