NaNoWriMo Shuts Down Amid AI Controversy and Financial Struggles

NaNoWriMo shut down after AI, content moderation scandals | TechCrunch

NaNoWriMo, a twenty-five-year-old online writing community-turned-nonprofit, announced on Monday evening that it is shutting down. NaNoWriMo -- an abbreviation of National Novel Writing Month -- is an annual challenge for writers to complete a rough draft of a novel during the month of November. After starting as a Yahoo! mailing list in 1999, the project grew into a self-described "internet-famous" writing challenge with hundreds of thousands of participants over more than two decades. The organization says it has had longstanding financial issues that have made it difficult to operate, but its other problems became more public last year. NaNoWriMo lost significant community support when it took a stand in favor of the use of artificial intelligence in creative writing. New York Times bestselling authors Maureen Johnson and Daniel José Older resigned from the nonprofit's board in response, reflecting a growing concern among writers about how their work is being stolen to train the very AI models that threaten their livelihoods. Around the same time, the nonprofit was also lambasted for inconsistent moderation on its all-ages forums, which created an unsafe environment for teenage writers, community members claimed. According to NaNoWriMo, these controversies over content moderation and AI did not directly lead to the organization's demise. But they certainly didn't help. "To blame NaNoWriMo's demise on the events of the last year does a disservice to all struggling nonprofits," a NaNoWriMo spokesperson, Kilby, stated in a YouTube video. "Too many members of a very large, very engaged community let themselves believe the service to be provided was free."

Longtime Writing Community NaNoWriMo Shuts Down After AI Drama

NaNoWriMo, the non-profit organization that grew out of the annual tradition National Novel Writing Month, had a solid 25-year run encouraging writers to speedrun the novel writing process, but it has come to an end. On Monday, the organization announced that it would cease operations due to ongoing financial issues, as well as some very public drama that has played out in recent years. In an email to community members (and shared on Reddit), the organization was pretty thorough in its reasoning. It acknowledged that the organization has had "six years of struggling to sustain itself financially," which certainly is not unique among arts-based non-profits. A report found that 25% of arts organizations were facing a deficit equal to more than 10% of their budgets in 2023. Those financial problems may have been in part what drove NaNoWriMo to partner with Inkitt in 2022, which drew backlash from the communityâ€"perhaps the first obvious red flag that things weren't going great. Inkitt, an online publishing platform, was accused by some authors of being a scam and a content slop farm that took advantage of young or new authors. The drama continued to boil up within NaNoWriMo in 2023 when a content moderator involved with the organization's Young Writer's Program forum was accused of running a smut site and grooming underage users. In addition to those claims, users complained about a general lack of attention from moderators that left user reports and complaints unresolved. While the board of the organization could not verify all of the allegations against the moderator accused of grooming, it opted to shut down the forum. Perhaps the highest profile stumble for NaNoWriMo came last year, though, when the organization issued a statement on the use of artificial intelligence. While the organization said it neither supports nor opposes the use of AI in writing, it did state, “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.†That did not sit well with many in the NaNoWriMo community, including some disabled members who feel there is a difference between using accommodating tools and generative AI. Authors Maureen Johnson and Daniel José Older resigned from the nonprofit’s board following the statement. Other authors condemned the stance, too, noting that generative AI models were likely trained on their works without permission or compensation. So, for the first time since 1999, there will be no more NaNoWriMo. If you want to write a full novel over the course of a month, you'll have to hold yourself accountable now.

NaNoWriMo Goes Bankrupt After Embracing AI

A quarter century after its inception -- and less than a year after its "full-throated" defense of artificial intelligence in writing -- the nonprofit behind the annual National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) challenge is closing its doors. Kilby Blades, a romance author serving as NaNoWriMo's interim executive director, announced in a video and in emails posted to social media that the nonprofit, which challenged participants to crank out a draft for a novel every November, would be shuttering because, essentially, it's out of money. In the nearly 30-minute-long video, Blades explained in detail the money problems that the competition -- which spawned the bestselling "Water For Elephants" and incorporated into a nonprofit six years ago -- has suffered, which sound both stark and legitimate. Though the interim director did address prior allegations of abuse and grooming regarding the nonprofit's forums, she failed to mention the most recent elephant in the room: that last year, the group changed its policies to allow those who participated in its annual creative writing challenge to use AI generators. Beyond just allowing the use of AI, NaNoWriMo also claimed that merely criticizing the technology -- which has put untold numbers of writers and other workers out of a job, threatens to do so with many more, and goes against the challenge's founding ethos of inspiring people to do the work of writing -- is tantamount to ableism. "We believe that to categorically condemn AI would be to ignore classist and ableist issues surrounding the use of the technology," the nonprofit's 2024 statement reads, "and that questions around the use of AI tie to questions around privilege." Unsurprisingly, that messaging attracted immense criticism. In the wake of its release, professionals who had been affiliated with the decades-spanning competition publicly denounced it. "Never use my name in your promo again," tweeted Daniel José Older, a New York Times bestselling young adult author and former NaNoWriMo board member, last September. "In fact never say my name at all and never email me again. Thanks." Maureen Johnson, another ex-board member and YA author, warned fellow writers on her way out the door about what the AI decision could mean. "I would also encourage writers to beware," Johnson wrote in an Instagram post, "your work on [NaNoWriMo's] platform is almost certainly going to be used to train AI." In the wake of the closure news, the usual usual suspects pointed to the grooming allegations leveled at NaNoWriMo -- accusations that were, it's worth noting, thoroughly investigated and handled by the nonprofit. Literary types, however, saw the AI writing on the wall. "So many people worked so hard to make NaNoWriMo what it was," children and YA author Maggie Tokuda-Hall posted on Bluesky, "and it was all squandered to prop up a plagiarism machine, truly betraying everything NaNo represented: the limitless creativity of normal people." "NaNoWriMo belongs to the writers, not some shit traitorous organization," another user declared. "Always has, always will." Indeed, for all that it became in its final years, NaNoWriMo was once a staple in the creative writing blogosphere and a way for those who didn't attend the Iowa Writers' Workshop to make names for themselves. Pedigree was never a factor for the challenge's winners, who all won upon writing at least 50,000 words during the month of November and who were only required to register for verification purposes. Obviously, the organization got mighty lost along the way, but it's still sad to see NaNoWriMo go -- and it feels like a harbinger of things to come.