With NaNo officially gone, tons of groups, orgs, and even companies are popping up trying to grab writers.
One of them is ProWritingAid and they claim Scrivener is a sponsor for their “novel” method of finishing a novel in a month. Literally everything about their method is basic NaNoWriMo.
I know PWA works with Scrivener, but…
Are you actually sponsoring them, or are they even more full of crap than I already know they are?
(edit: reverted the subject to my question and not a promo. Because ew, I am not promoting this event.)
What surprises me is not that various groups have popped up, but that this didn’t happen years ago. There are absolutely no barriers to entry to running an equivalent event to NaNoWriMo as long as you don’t try and use their name. Two reasons spring to mind as to what might have previously put people off:
everyone in the writing community is so jolly nice that they wouldn’t possible think of it. “After you, sir; no, after you” or
there’s no money in it — at least; it’s always been cheaper to simply sponsor NaNo than to roll your own.
I don’t know the answer to your question as to whether it’s a legit sponsorship, but… why wouldn’t LL sponsor an event that encourages people to write? As a company, LL have always shown themselves to be supporters of writers everywhere. Jolly good show, if you ask me. Pip, pip.
It wasn’t intended to be friendly and nice, fyi. Nor was it intended to promote them. I think PWA are a bunch of liars (they lie about having features it’s easy to check that they don’t have, for example) so I wanted to check if Scrivener was actually supporting them and that’s why their logo was in that section on the page.
Given that PWA is pro-gen-AI, if you’re not (as I’m not), having their program on your computer counting words is not something I’m willing to even consider. Companies change their terms of service all the time, quietly, and there’s no saying it’ll stay at only counting words, nor stay free to participate.
A formal organization isn’t needed to do a novel writing challenge. A for-profit organization using NaNoWriMo’s exact structure and calling it ‘novel’ makes me suspicious. Find yourself a community group you’re comfortable with.
Absolutely. Find a community. Get encouraged. Etc etc.
Of course, it’s easier to find a community when someone is helping facilitate that. And larger communities have a cost attached to running them, meaning someone somewhere is going to have to pay for some product and or service to justify it.
Presumably because you intended it to be super friendly and super nice! Yay!
I also have serious misgivings about PWA and will be staying well away. I’m actually suprised there remains an association between L&L and PWA given they are pro-AI through and through. Basically anti-writer, however they dress it, IMO.
I’d be encouraging as many people as possible to write with whatever support they like if my company made stuff for writers.
My basic position is this: I don’t personally use Artificial Intelligence for roughly the same reason I don’t use artificial legs; I have actual legs.
I do not begrudge people who actually need artificial legs using them.[1]
Although those aren’t the people I’d approach if I wanted to look at a damn good leg. Plus the people with actual legs who start using artificial ones really freak me out. And I just wish the people who made artificial legs didn’t need to steal legs from healthy people to make them. Yeah, I did not think this metaphor through and it got weird on me pretty quickly. ↩︎
I love how the metaphor crashes and burns (like many of my own): We can grow the ability to write with years of hard work and determination. We can’t grow new legs, no matter how hard we try.
However, there are plenty of businesses right now happy to sell you new limbs, vat-grown from DNA samples that may or may not have been taken from millions of people without their consent. Oh, and the vats are wildly polluting. Oh, and you’re being charged by the inch. Want more height? You’re gonna have to pay an arm and a… well, you know.
(Just to really beat the metaphor to death.)
“I have a magic machine that burns rain forests in exchange for mathematically average language” is not nearly as sexy as saying “it’s a thinking box.”
According to today’s L&L Newsletter: “We are proud to be sponsoring ProWritingAid’s inaugural Novel November, …” (it’s not secret knowledge, anyone can sign up for those newsletters).
Hi everyone, Julia here (L&L Marketing). Just to clear up the confusion, yes we are sponsoring ProWritingAid’s new event, and I just want to explain why. The demise of NaNoWriMo has left a bit of a hole and there have been a number of organisations both large and small that are running something NaNo-like at the end of this year, basically because there are a lot of writers out there looking for a new home.
The PWA event ticked a lot of boxes as I wanted us to support something that was:
totally free to participate in.
had the potential to bring a lot of writers together to complete a definite and sizeable challenge.
was fully accountable - if NaNoWriMo taught us anything, it’s that if you have a community you need to know who’s moderating everything, and that everything will be moderated.
I just want to assure you that PWA don’t use their writers’ work to train generative AI. PWA set this out on their site here: Does ProWritingAid use AI? - ProWritingAid Help Center You don’t need to download / use the PWA app to take part.
Hopefully that’s helpful but if you have any questions, just ask away.
It’s a for-profit organization, and you know what that means. If something is free, you’re not the customer, you’re the product.
This year maybe they’re being above-board. Terms of service change all the time. And promoting any kind of LLM use even if they’re not (currently) training one is a hard no for me.
The terms also define which specific features use genAI and which don’t.
The genAI companies have been very successful in redefining “AI” to mean themselves. But actually a whole range of tools falls under that umbrella. DevonThink, for instance, has always been able to use its internal AI features to find “documents like this one.” Their latest version adds the ability to query LLMs. So their documentation tries to be very clear about which features do what, which features potentially expose your data to third parties, and so on. That’s IMO an ethical approach to offering the features, and that seems to be (for now) what PWA is doing as well.
Just wanted to thank the OP @janra for starting this thread. I don’t know that I would have heard about PWA’s Novel November event if you hadn’t posted about it. I never took the opportunity to do NaNo, but this year the timing might be right for me to give PWA’s version a try.
… Like the name… Registered.