On this, just to say that, as sponsors, we have been in regular touch with NaNoWriMo over the past few days to express our concerns and those of our users, pushing them to rethink what they are saying. We also really appreciate the discussion around it, and our users bringing it to our attention, and I hope it goes without saying that we don’t agree with NaNo’s initial FAQ entry with its bizarre language about “classism” and “ableism”. I’m glad to see that they have now completely replaced the entry, and that the new entry, while far from perfect, at least acknowledges the genuine and valid concerns of writers surrounding AI, rather than seeming dismissive of them.
Last night one of our team did in fact speak to the person responsible for the FAQ post. Like most at NaNo, which is a very small non-profit, she’s an unpaid volunteer working with little support, so she was a bit shell-shocked about the problems she has caused and the anger she is currently facing. We get the impression that the original FAQ entry was actually a misguided attempt at offending nobody, which of course ended up offending everybody through a lack of understanding of the issues involved. We understand what they were trying to say, but it was poorly worded and misjudged. We have therefore been active in advocating for the concerns of writers, using our position as sponsors to apply a little pressure on them to acknowledge those concerns and do better.
Our own stance on AI is that it has no place in our software, since it doesn’t fit with the sort of thing we’re interested in creating. Our aim has always been to create software writing environments that give writers the flexibility to work how they want. We want to help writers unlock their creativity - not usurp it. So we provide the software equivalent of pens, paper, typewriters, notebooks, cork boards; writers provide the words - not bots. It’s entirely up to users what other tools they use with our software.
We most likely will not, however, actively disable in our apps AI features that are added to the operating systems they run on. I’m thinking here of Apple’s forthcoming “Apple Intelligence”. With that sort of thing we can’t win: while some users will object to us not disabling it entirely, others will not appreciate us removing features provided by the OS and available in every other app. (Fortunately such features are tucked away and not integral, and it seems that Apple will allow users to turn them off anyway.)
I’m not sure it’s reasonable to expect to buy products only from people whose every opinion we agree with, so long as they aren’t out there actively doing evil, which we certainly are not. But I hope our stance on AI reassures our users about where we are headed. I will add that, like many writers and readers, personally I have serious concerns about the sort of generative AI, often trained on dubiously-sourced material, that threatens to plagiarise and supplant human creativity, not to mention issues of copyright and attribution. I’m all for tools that help writers and other artists achieve their creative goals, whether those tools involve some form of AI or not. What worries me are the sorts of large language models trained on works of human art with the aim, or at least potential, of replacing human art with soulless remixes, and putting writers out of work. Beyond that, I have no special insight, since I have nothing to do with AI in my coding.
That said, L&L is not a monolithic entity but a company of individuals, so you might find other members of the team expressing different opinions here or there. I get to say what goes into our apps, though. 
We have had a handful of users contact us to demand that we withdraw our sponsorship from NaNoWriMo in response their recent AI statement, which has compounded other problems with NaNo recently. However, I fail to see how defunding one the biggest community events for writers would further the cause of human creativity.
Given how short-staffed they seem, I’m not sure if they will last anyway, but I do know that if sponsors pull out now there is a very real chance that there won’t be a NaNoWriMo 2025. Is that really the best outcome? Moral grandstanding would be a very easy way of signaling to everyone how wonderful we are, but I’m not convinced it would be of any actual use to the writing community. NaNoWriMo has helped so many writers achieve their goals that, despite its recent fall from grace, I think it’s premature to want them gone. And to be very honest, I would not want to be responsible for destroying the very event that launched our entire company. I’m not sure how principled that would really be.
I hope, then, that most of our users can see why we would rather use any power we have as sponsors for constructive rather than destructive purposes. Naturally, we will constantly review any organization we are associated with, and if we became convinced that NaNoWriMo were genuinely acting in bad faith, or were working against the best interest of writers, we would of course cut our ties.
I know from a couple of emails we have received that this won’t please everyone. Those who disagree with our refusal to defund NaNo at this juncture so passionately that they wish to boycott us must of course follow their conscience - just so long as they are also boycotting companies that are truly threatening writers with their positions on AI, such as Meta and Amazon. 
This post was written without the assistance of AI.