NaNoWriMo is under fire for suggesting that AI tools might be acceptable under certain circumstances. Here’s my position.
It is unethical to use AI tools to create works that you then sell as your own product. That is plagiarism.
It is unethical to use AI tools to create works if you have the financial resources to buy, and even commission, those works from a working creator.
Environmental issues aside*, it is ethical to use AI tools to create works for your own use, such as to create art therapeutically, get ideas for stories, and so on.
When it comes to a writing contest where there’s money involved, or promises of publication, it is completely unethical to use AI tools unless they’re specifically allowed by the rules. Even if you use AI tools to get initial ideas, the final words must be your own.
When it comes to a writing activity, like NaNoWriMo, where the entire goal is intrinsic, where so many people have completed the task over the last quarter century that “I finished NaNo!” isn’t an earth-shaking Olympic declaration, it’s inane to use AI to write your novel unless you have a real obstacle.
Certain disabilities make it difficult or impossible to write or even speak 50,000 words. Using AI with customized prompts (“ChatGPT, I have a vision of a dystopian world. In that world…”) in that situation, I’m good with that. I have no problem with someone else saying they completed NaNo on their own terms, in the face of their own challenges.
At the same time, as a high school teacher, I am sadly all too familiar with students who use tools to avoid work that they would be capable of completing, they just don’t want to. And while I recognize that in many cases there are valid psychological, trauma-related reasons for their resistance, I also recognize that saying you wrote 50,000 words when you didn’t is lying.
That said, “I won NaNoWriMo” is not a limited resource (unlike the water used by AI supercomputers). If someone uses ChatGPT to “write” a novel that they would otherwise be capable of completing on their own, shame on them, but whatever. I know that my five** NaNos are legitimate, and it’s not up to me to scold others for how they did theirs.
* AI uses a lot of environmental resources, especially water used to cool the supercomputers. So, there’s that ethical layer as well.
** Six total, one done during an April fugue instead.