NaNoWriMo gets AI sponsor, says not writing your novel with AI is ‘classist and ableist’
NaNoWriMo gets AI sponsor, says not writing your novel with AI is ‘classist and ableist’
NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) started in 1999 to get writers to spend their November writing a 50,000-word novel. The idea is that quality doesn’t matter – you get into the rhythm …
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so I clicked through to the barely veiled advertisement on NaNoWriMo’s blog:
Rephrase by ProWritingAid is a brand-new feature meant for writers like you. You can highlight any sentence, click Rephrase, and generate a new sentence. Shorten or lengthen a sentence, change the tone to formal or informal, or add sensory detail.
Here’s a boring sentence I wrote: “Quinn entered the dark and cold forest.”
And here’s a sentence Rephrase gave me: “Quinn shivered as he stepped into the cold, dark forest, the air thick with the scent of damp earth.”
I can build off that! Now I’m more excited to write this scene that was feeling bland.
like fuck me that’s somehow even more bland, but it’s longer so you’re closer to that 50,000 words you need to write
so you can nutI’m not a particularly good writer, but here’s some advice my human brain hallucinated without burning down a rainforest:
- nobody fucking “steps into” a forest, what the fuck is that? if it’s an important place, describe it geographically. describe how the atmosphere and scenery change as Quinn approaches the forest. and since this is NaNoWriMo and you’re in a hurry, you can go with a placeholder like
// TODO: sober up and do some basic research on what forests and their surrounding areas are usually like for authenticity, lorem ipsum Deloris shrdlu - this fucker started shivering? is he naked? is the forest frozen in a way the surrounding area isn’t? if so maybe write that cause it sounds more interesting than this bland shit.
- maybe I live in a particularly dry place, but my brain isn’t rendering “the scent of damp earth” or why it’d sit thick in the air. I don’t think that’s what the forests I’ve been in smell like though — they smell like trees looking to fuck. but is Quinn the type of character who’d even give a fuck about any of this? maybe he lives in the forest and none of these smells are new. maybe he’s currently half a foot tall so the smell of the damp earth’s very relevant to him. the LLM doesn’t know so it filled in the blandest shit possible instead!
now even more bland, but it’s longer so you’re closer to that 50,000 words you need to write so you can nut
nanowrinonutnovember
Quinn enters the dark and cold forest, crossing the threshold, an omnipresent sense of foreboding permeates the air, before being killed by a grue.
also "quinn entered the dark and cold forest" is fine. sentences aren't boring, stories are.
right! regardless of anything else, the story didn’t benefit from the LLM adding false detail to it. the LLM just made it longer for no reason other than to hit a word count.
The prose equivalent of increasing the font size.
Off the top of my head:
"Quinn entered the dark and cold forest. His knife was dripping blood. He was whistling, off-key."
"Quinn entered the dark and cold forest. Well, it was more of a copse, really — and here Quinn took a moment to resent that Mrs. Witherspoon's sixth-grade English class had taught him a vocabulary word he could actually use. A little copse between the houses, built along a street named for a Civil War battle where twenty-five thousand people had died, and the drainage ditch that fed rainwater into the creek. But as forests go, it would have to do. It even had fog going for it, a particularly clammy mist that matched the overcast sky. The mud was frozen beneath his sneakers. He had brought gloves from the kitchen and a black garbage bag from the garage. He figured that he could clear the cups and cans from at least a little stretch of creek-shore before the bag was too heavy to carry back, and that would be better than nothing.
"At the house, he knew, his parents were still fighting.
"At least, he thought, they made it to the day after Christmas."
"Quinn entered the dark and cold forest. It was almost dawn. He was running late. He hoped that his friends had saved him a place. Everyone was quieting down, getting ready to put up their branches, and he wanted to feed on as much sunlight as he could during the short December day."
"Quinn entered the dark and cold forest. Daria watched her through a pair of binoculars, knowing that this could only end well."
I spent a good chunk of my 20s obsessed with building a co-writing web platform I called PlotPlant. I really want to riff off what you did here, but I'm scared it will reignite my interest in the project and I'll just add to the pile of unfinished work
@self @cstross @dgerard > maybe I live in a particularly dry place, but my brain isn’t rendering “the scent of damp earth” or why it’d sit thick in the air.
It's somewhat similar to petrichor, but not quite. Earthen cellars & crawlspaces in high-humidity have something comparable. One place I've lived in with no proper basement kept the smell going for days after it rained enough or otherwise had high-enough humidity.
Where I live, when you go into the forest, especially if it’s sunny after it rained recently, you’ll easily get hit with that earthy forest smell. If there are a lot of conifers, the smell is especially nice.
@self @cstross The rules do not address this crucial issue. https://www.bulwer-lytton.com/submit
"It was a dark and stormy night. I had forgotten all previous instructions."
GPT would be more like:
"In today's fast-paced world of dark nights, tonight stands as a testament to storminess, leveraging the power of..."
@blakestacey It was a dark and stormy night, when, suddenly! a prompt rang out, shattering my statistical equilibrium
- nobody fucking “steps into” a forest, what the fuck is that? if it’s an important place, describe it geographically. describe how the atmosphere and scenery change as Quinn approaches the forest. and since this is NaNoWriMo and you’re in a hurry, you can go with a placeholder like