NaNoWriMo shut down after AI, content moderation scandals

NaNoWriMo, a 25-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.”