Apparently four members of Nano’s “Writers Board” (whatever that is) have stepped down over their statement.
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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.
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Thank you for such a detailed response, Keith. It is greatly appreciated.
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I urge you not to treat either the literal dishonesty or the intellectual dishonesty put on display by Nanowrimo’s executive director as fact. This is about far more than the use of AI. This is about recognizing the fact that art is fundamentally a working class pursuit, that writers and artists are always among the first to call out oppression, deception, and abuse whenever they see it. Because of the words and actions of its executive director, Nanowrimo has become exactly the kind of thing every writer has a moral obligation to stand against.
Let’s not obfuscate or pretend that this issue is tricky or confusing. The simple truth is Nano abused minors, covered it up, broke its trust with its userbase, and sold itself out to companies that are developing technologies designed not to write as well as people but simply to put them out of work and decimate an entire sector of the economy. Everything that the organization has done over the past year plus is morally repugnant and to be associated with it is to be associated with those deeds. I simply cannot understand how any group of decent people could stomach that.
We will begin with the abuse of minors in Nanowrimo’s young writers program which has been documented in testimonials. Teenagers were belittled, insulted, had innuendos thrown at them, and were deliberately isolated from adults who could have helped them by the moderators who ran the program. If that wasn’t bad enough, Nano allowed one of their senior moderators constant contact with children despite growing evidence that they were directing underage kids to an adult sexual fetish website and message board. This senior moderator had direct access to every one of those underage users’ contact information. The organization allowed the moderator to store this information on a separate device, and further did not dismiss the moderator until after several people had filed a criminal complaint with the FBI.
It’s actually still possible to officially abuse children through Nano’s young writers program. One can apply to be an educator and open a digital classroom, without the need to prove one actually is an educator, and then message students privately. Image sharing is supposed to be banned, but there’s a very simple (frighteningly simple) workaround to this that allows one to share any images with students. The organization has been repeatedly notified of this and has done little to nothing to correct it.
Its only solution, in fact, was to force volunteers to sign a dozen page contract that required them to verify their identities in such a way that the safety of non-binary volunteers would be severely compromised, especially in states or countries where their existence is a crime.
That is merely the tip of an iceberg that formed well before this latest desire of Nanowrimo to turn into a union busting shill for the tech bros. Much more can be found here.
Now, on to the thing that’s taken an entire news cycle by storm in a world where that should frankly be impossible. It’s a well established principle that generative AI is theft. If we would look down an an author copying another person’s work word for word, why would we be fine with an author copying the work of thousands and passing it off as their own, without ever actually writing a single thing down? Words have to mean something or writing itself may not exist. Generating is not writing. This is not a hard concept. It’s not huge, it’s not nebulous, it’s not any other word that is being used to deliberately muddy a simple debate about a clear concept.
More than that, it’s a slap in the face to any Scrivener customer who’s represented by the WGA or works in a job where they wishes they were. I guarantee you that there are professional screen writers who use Scrivener. Are they supposed to be ok with Scrivener sponsoring an organization that’s endorsing the thing they fought against for months? Is that supposed to be fine just because a bunch of hustle culture acolytes desperate for the praise of an apartheid diamond mine heir say it’s inevitable? Actual working writers won hard fought concessions and anyone who considers themselves a writer has a duty to stand in solidarity with them instead of feeding the people and tools trying to end them.
The executive director of Nanowrimo not only undermined the entire challenge with their full throated support of AI, not only didn’t run it literally anyone else in their organization, but just endorsed crossing every picket line in every future strike over AI forever. And called anyone opposed to that abelist, classist, and probably racist on top of it. The only ones I can see endorsing a stance like that, either actively or by inaction, are AI language models themselves. But actual humans would have to be crazy to stand by Nanowrimo as it takes a wrecking ball to writing and the creative industry.
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What a disappointing, dismissive response
What a disappointing, dismissive response
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Sorry I’m not happy about someone associated with scrivener going to bat for an organization that not only put out a statement regarding its support of AI, but an organization that badly mishandled a mod grooming children
NaNoWriMo is not a poor little underdog. Kilby Blades is not a hapless volunteer who just so happened to find people turned against her. I find that reply to be a disingenuous, fingerwagging framing of the situation.
Interesting, I thought it was extremely balanced and thoughtful. I guess some people are just never happy.
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Well. At least they’re making headlines (for the wrong reasons): https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/06/style/nanowrimo-ai-writing-challenge.html
I wasn’t aware of all the other accusations brought up here after Keith’s statement and I bet he wasn’t, either.
Not sure if the outcome would have been wildly different, though. Sounds like most this stuff needs to be handled by the criminal justice system (which L&L is not), and then based on the outcome the whole situation should be reevaluated.
It gets worse and worse, the more you dig into their own website (which I also didn’t do until after this “AI” madness). Personally, I wouldn’t want to be associated with these people. But I don’t work here.
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I think we can agree NaNo’s statement is bad without misrepresenting it ourselves. They said they don’t explicitly support nor condemn any specific approach, “including the use of AI.” I don’t like their stance—at all—but it’s far from “full-throated endorsement,” and claiming it as such only undermines our own position.
Per Keith, it wasn’t even the executive director who wrote the original statement but an unpaid volunteer. Unless you have evidence to the contrary, I don’t see any way we can know the executive director unilaterally made any decisions.
That said, maybe you think L&L was lied to. Given what I’ve learned in the past few days since this AI FAQ piece blew up, there’s definitely a non-zero (maybe even likely) possibility of that. Last year’s scandal is far more troubling than this year’s.
I think Keith’s response was very measured and level-headed. If it were just the AI thing, I’d agree with it wholeheartedly. With the rest, I’m less sure. It’s easy for me to sit here, with no stakes in either business, to say I’d drop the sponsorship if it were my decision. I know zero of the intricacies involved, however, and my opinion is colored by my belief that NaNo-the-organization does not and never needed to exist in the first place.
L&L has a business to run. Given past interactions[1], I trust they’ll take what they honestly feel is the best path forward.
[1] This is a brand-new account made just for this post, so some might call me a sock-puppet. Unfortunately, I can’t access the account (Cinder6) I’ve had since at least 2012, because the forum doesn’t like the password in my password manager, and I don’t have the email address associated with it anymore. Skepticism is fair, so believe my sincerity or don’t, as you choose.
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So, since the AI issue has been pretty well covered by the various news articles, I can provide some context about the other controversy – the grooming scandal. Scrivener was notified of that controversy last November, but IIRC, they were waiting to see how NaNo handled that situation.
Here’s the deal - as someone who was part of NaNoWrimo for nearly two decades, and who was also part of the group of users who compiled the initial report about the grooming issue to send to NaNo HQ and the FBI.
NaNoWriMo’s forums were incredibly understaffed, and existing staff was overwhelmed. One of their moderators volunteered to take a large portion of the workload involving the forums - migrating NaNoWriMo’s new forums to Discourse, as well as independently handling the teen thread of minors (a very fast-moving thread with lots of active posts). NaNo HQ, burned out and understaffed, allowed this volunteer moderator far, far too much power on the forums, something that went on for several years. Apparently no one was checking on how this moderator was interacting in the teen thread - which regularly hit the max-post limit due to the fast-moving nature of teen convos, meaning most conversations were buried quickly.
A group of users discovered that this mod, who was also a ML at one point, also ran a NSFW adult fetish website (where they also used Discourse), and talked about grooming the teens within the teen thread to invite them to the fetish website. In addition to this, adult fetish site users were invited into the teen thread to interact with the teens.
This was immediately reported to HQ, with screenshots and evidence, to convince NaNoWriMo that they needed to act immediately to freeze the moderator’s access, freeze the teen thread, and launch a full investigation.
That investigation… never happened.
We now know (via leaked internal screenshots and talking with past staff), that NaNo HQ was completely unprepared to handle something like this. The teen-space moderator had claimed to have a terminal illness, so (and yes, we have this backed up by former moderators, and have screenshots), NaNo HQ decided to just “wait for the problem to solve itself”. Which is just… awful, in so many ways.
The director of community relations even went into the ML discord and told existing MLs to “starve this issue of oxygen” (and yes, we have screenshots) if any hint of the grooming scandal made its way into regional discords or chat spaces.
NaNo staff then began banning people on the forums who spoke up, deleting threads of other grooming victims who came forward, silencing users and giving MLs talking points to try and sweep it all away.
Anyway. The board stepping in gave everyone a brief glimmer of hope, but they’ve so grossly mishandled pretty much everything that I think it’s really time to let the NaNoWriMo organization fade into the sunset. Watching Kilby, the interim executive director, puppet around the corpse of NaNo for financial solicitation while embracing stances that go against the core principles of the event should give everyone a reason to leave.
So… while I guess I can see how L&L might still think this organization can be saved, I’ll say that the wider writing community has already begun the mourning process for the NaNoWriMo that we once loved – that made many of us fall in love with writing. It doesn’t exist anymore - and really, hasn’t for a long time. Years of bad decisions led up to this moment, and our hope is that L&L doesn’t choose to go down with the flaming wreckage of NaNo’s brand integrity. Because there’s no question at this point - NaNoWriMo (the organization/brand) cannot recover from this. The AI issue has catapulted NaNo into the spotlight, and more news coverage is coming.
Lots of us DO love Scrivener, and many, many people are looking to L&L right now to see if this space, at least, can wrench itself free of the tainted legacy of our former favorite writing space.
Happy to answer any questions anyone has.
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I appreciate the response but I respectively disagree with the stance. Given the past history over the last year and a half with NaNoWriMo I would come down on the side of strongly urging you to remove your sponsorship. It is not a bad thing for an organization to die when it has gone so far off the rails.
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I can only shake my head at these fundamentalist anti-AI opponents.
“AI” is a broad and misused term at best. There are genuine, legitimate concerns around the impact of generative AI - especially regarding how they are trained and morally dubious application. Then you have excellent tools like Grammarly and Apple Intelligence that assist rather than create. Not to mention ChatGPT and Copilot, which will confidently lie to your face. Putting these things aside, you then have huge environmental costs.
FYI I use ChatGPT and Copilot heavily at work. I use Grammarly to support my dyslexia in writing. I’d never use any of this to generate anything creative because it wouldn’t be me creating it.
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Do you have any information how this progressed, e.g. is there an ongoing investigation (by the FBI or other authorities)?
I use AI support to work on my texts and not to generate them. It’s different with illustrations, where I use generative AI, either to create illustrations or to create images that inspire my writing. ChatGPT 40, DeepL, LT (language tool) MidJourney, Pixelmator Pro (image post-processing), Apple Intelligence … AI tools will increasingly find their way into our work. Of course, you can refuse to use them, but that’s not my attitude. What the NaNoWriMo team wanted to express is that it is neutral towards the new technology and does not condemn new approaches to using AI tools. The fact that some people are now calling for a shitstorm and demanding that the project’s funding be withdrawn is absolutely ridiculous. Authors who use NaNoWriMo as an incentive to motivate themselves are sawing off their own branches.
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We were told once submitting report that it would take time to evaluate, and that we would be given no updates.
As the fetish website purged a substantial amount of data and locked down to members-only after NaNo altered the moderator that people were asking questions about it, we’re hopeful that whatever tools the FBI has can circumvent that.
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Thanks for the update. I was hoping that it maybe led to some kind of prosecution, a case number, anything “official”. I’m not implying that your report is unsubstantiated. That’s all very worrying, to say the least.
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There is a larger collaborative piece coming out (likely this month) from a big news outlet about the grooming scandal specifically that includes what evidence was able to be shared with the media, which is one of the reasons people are pushing L&L so hard to withdraw now, before that drops.
The AI controversy was an unexpected additional gaffe by NaNoWriMo’s interim executive director (who is posturing herself as an “unpaid volunteer” for some reason), but it has provided a doorway to exit from the sinking ship, so my only hope is that L&L’s sense of self preservation outweighs their nostalgia for an organization that no longer exists as a beneficial service to the writing community.
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I’d love to know why L&L is continuing to support NaNoWriMo after all this grooming stuff. Scrivener is objectively a great piece of software! I’ve used it heavily for nearly eight years, and it’s carrying me through my degree right now. As a disabled user, I love the ability to colour-code my rounds of edits, making creating portfolios and providing proof of editing much easier. I think I’ve purchased it four or five times now, and it’s home to millions of my words.
Your software became the safest way to write millions of words, plan my essays, and draft and redraft stupid poems that eventually looked semi-decent. It didn’t crash; it was reliable, and it meant that on those terrible, very bad days, I could lie in bed and do something with myself instead of melting into a blob. When my eyes saw letters as pointy and could hardly read things, I had a great setup that allowed me to push through. I consider Scrivener to be on the same level as my other accessibility tools because it enables me to do the things that I love on my good and bad days.
NaNoWriMo is clearly beyond saving. Scrivener is not. You do not need to go down with this ship. So many of us would support you with the same devotion we once showed NaNoWriMo. If you think I wouldn’t live out the dreams of my younger self, who aspired to deck herself out in NaNoWriMo merch from head to toe, you’re wrong. At least Scrivener hasn’t harboured a damn child predator and decided their best approach was to let them die.
This is not me being reactive and refusing to give NaNoWriMo grace. Collectively, I’m sure most of us have given NaNoWriMo what borders on too much grace. Push aside your feelings on AI (I know, it’s tough!) and look at the situation.
Do you want to be known as one of the sponsors that decided children were acceptable collateral damage because paid members of staff didn’t want to do their jobs? An endorsement on their sponsor page is a sign that I should stay away from your software. And a diplomatic stepping away indicates that you appear to care about the very real victims, some of whom I know are still watching the situation closely. It is reassuring to somebody like me, who feels tremendous guilt over sending young people to what I thought was a safe space.
You can reach people through NaNoWriMo. But will they be the same people with four licenses seeking you out on your forums and engaging with you and your community? You have summoned some of the most devoted lovers of NaNoWriMo who knew when it was time to step away. If they are anything like me, they want to ensure that your software doesn’t get caught in the crossfire because they see the merit in what you offer to the world.
It’s your prerogative to decide whether or not you want to go down with them. If I didn’t know the nitty-gritty details of what they allowed to go on, perhaps I’d applaud your devotion to them. But I can’t. You offer something helpful to the world, where NaNoWriMo seems committed to causing harm.
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