NaNoWriMo shut down after AI, content moderation scandals

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 v ... Read full article.