Nanowrimo, a 25-year-old nonprofit that has been turned into an online writing community, announced it was shutting down Monday evening.
Nanowrimo – Abbreviation for National Novel Writing Month – is an annual assignment for writers to complete a rough draft of their novel in November. After starting as Yahoo!, Mailing List in 1999, the project grew into a self-proclaimed “internet and famous” writing challenge with hundreds of thousands of participants for over 20 years.
The organization says it has long-standing economic issues that have made it difficult to operate, but other issues have been made public since last year.
Nanowrimo lost support from a critical community when he took a stand in favor of the use of artificial intelligence in creative writing.
New York Times bestselling authors Maureen Johnson and Daniel José Leland responded, resigning from the nonprofit’s board of directors, reflecting growing concerns about how writers are being stolen to train highly AI models that threaten their livelihoods.
Around the same time, the nonprofit was criticized for inconsistent moderation in all age forums, creating a dangerous environment for teenage writers, claiming community members had.
According to Nanowrimo, these controversies about content moderation and AI did not directly lead to the organization’s end mise. But they certainly didn’t help.
“Criticizing Nanoulimo’s end mise on last year’s events will damage all nonprofits who are struggling,” Nanoulimo spokesman Kilby said in a YouTube video. “Too many members of a very large and very enthusiastic community made me believe the services offered were free.”
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