It’s wonderful that social media has balkanized so much since that one guy bought twitter! I no longer have any idea what thing people are complaining about on your Internet; I only know what they’re complaining about on my Internet. I love the idea that people might be complaining about different things on different internets, although to judge by what I hear, on most of those internets they’re just complaining that miscegenation is legal or women can vote. But the principle is nice. Let a thousand stupid posting websites bloom. It’s the next best thing to social media falling apart entirely and all of us touching grass.
On my internet — which is the self-congratulatingly wholesome Twitter alternative known as “BlueSky” — here is what people are complaining about today. The semi-official body that oversees National Novel Writing Month has officially proclaimed that AI-written novels “count” as national-month-written novels. Not only that, they have gone on to say that if this seems strange to you, you are a bad person and you should write (or have AI write for you) an apology to the spirit of Helen Keller:
We also want to be clear in our belief that the categorical condemnation of Artificial Intelligence has classist and ableist undertones, and that questions around the use of AI tie to questions around privilege.
Man, “undertones” really are a get-out-of-making-an-argument-free card, aren’t they? “You ran over my foot.” “Yeah, OK, but the way you were standing on the street had problematic undertones.”
Now, look. I don’t have a problem with “National Novel Writing Month.” I make a point of saying this because occasionally I meet people who would like to do more writing, who participate in this annual event (which is literally just a self-imposed obligation to write 50,000 words during November), and then feel really embarrassed about it afterward. There’s no need for embarrassment. With any fascinating but difficult activity, people use all sorts of things to get themselves going: uppers, caffeine, coaching, a beginner’s class, a pinky-promise with a similarly motivated friend. That list can certainly include a made-up Internet holiday (all holidays are made up) and an online “community.” It’s a humble way to begin, but aren’t they all. I mean, I learned to read by looking at picture books while my dad helped me sound out the words, and then I went to fucking kindergarten, like some kind of normie. When I wanted to start lifting weights more intensely, I read about it on the internet, and then did that yuppie cliche thing of signing up for a gym membership. Dork! Poseur! I feel no shame about any of that and you should feel no shame about “doing” “NaNoWriMo” if it helps you. I do feel some misgivings about a community of writers that chooses that particular sobriquet to identify itself with — it’s not exactly euphonious — but people do MFAs for the same reason they do “NaNoWriMo,” to give themselves permission and space, and “MFA” doesn’t sound any prettier.
I do, however, care that a 501(c)3 supposedly devoted to promoting “writing” is pandering to its sponsors in this way, and using this utterly dishonest appeal to social justice to do so. David Gerard at pivot-to-ai.com has a nice riposte to NaNo’s “argument,” that what they are really defending is “their sponsors’ class-privileged ability to plagiarize your stuff wholesale, then defraud unpublished writers with it.” In a sane world, that would be the end of the conversation; and this scandal may well be the end of this pointless organization, at which point people can spend November quickly writing a bad first draft in a grassroots way. (Colson Whitehead’s suggested alternative is even better.)
But it’s worth taking a second to point out a couple things. One: I have met smart people (some of them, uh, not typical in their brain functioning or in possession of unimpaired bodily faculties) who propose that we just dispense with the concept “ableism.” This won’t work, I don’t think: just because a concept can be stretched till it’s useless doesn’t mean that there isn’t a real thing named by it. Ableism is definitely real and deadly enough. It’s also a concept very vulnerable to this kind of abuse. Any conditions that we set on any activity — even just those imposed by the activity itself — can be seen as difficulties, and from there you simply say that if a thing is difficult in general, it will be more difficult for anyone who faces any other sort of disadvantage, and then
… baby, you’ve got a stew going! So it’s important not to let the word “ableist” become an automatic argument-ending death-blow, either. We’re required to think about the claims that this term is used to make. Even if we are not in the group that the word is used to make claims on behalf of; even if doing so means we are “outside our lane.”
One of the promises of the concept of ableism — besides the overt and most important one, that of making the world fairer and less generally miserable — is that it can force us to think about the real nature of any activity we’re doing, what is essential and what is just accidental. In that rethinking, we find new and aesthetically or intellectually interesting possibilities. Does musical theatre actually require that everybody involved be able to walk unassisted? Maybe not! Maybe we actually learn new things about Oklahoma by casting Ali Stroker, who uses a wheelchair, as Ado Annie. Does everybody have to hear, or even speak? Not everybody, although probably somebody does.1 Sometimes you end up transforming the nature of the activity a bit, but that’s how new art forms are born. Nobody should object to this in principle — not just because it’s snobbish, but because it’s anti-intellectual and uncreative.
Equally, though, this process will tend to disclose some limits to the malleability of any activity’s conceptual borders. That there be some actual shape to it — that’s just implicit in being anything at all. Let’s say I show up at a Zen temple to meditate and I bring along my phone and set it on the floor next to me with the timer going, and then I say, I have ADHD, so meditation is boring and hard for me.2 However, I subscribe to a computational theory of consciousness, so I recognize no real difference between the phone’s activity in mindlessly counting down a given time period and meditating, which I can’t do. I’ve outsourced meditation. I call it meditation 2.0. If you kick me out it’s ableist. They might let you and your phone sit there, since Buddhists are often very obliging people, but you still haven’t meditated. If you further say Look, I’m busy. Unlike you people, I have class disadvantages and have to work for a living. I’m going to loudly conduct business meetings on my open laptop while you guys engage in your old-school “meditation 1.0” shit, they’ll probably eventually ask you to leave.
But, and this is my second point, it seems to me like literature people are unusually resistant to this second part of the process — to identifying and defending what we’re actually doing here, what is irreducible and unavoidable. But this reluctance can hurt us. It can make our subjects, and our jobs, and ultimately the ability of students from a wide variety of backgrounds and with a wide variety of abilities and in- or disabilities to access those subjects, harder to defend. If you say, this year, that it’s not that important for everyone to write their own papers, because AI ChatGPT Workplace of the Future Real World Aren’t We Always Already Cyborgs Anyway, in a few years your dean will say, I have a neat suggestion for cutting labor costs and Expanding the Accessibility of Higher Education. If you say, this year, Let’s cut the language requirement because in the future we’ll all just use AI to translate from every language into English near-instanteously, in a few years, your president will say Why the hell do we still have a classics department? Of course we should make any subject exactly as accessible as it admits of being. But if you put “accessibility” ahead of “thing you’re making accessible,” you end up with nothing.
Probably? Ask a theatre person.
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LOL! It is so funny that NaNoWriMo has some kind of ruling about what counts in their totally honor based word count meter, and that people actually care! Why would anyone even want to write a novel with AI??? It seems so tedious!