otherkinnews | Alterhuman Writing Challenge

In November 2024, The Sol System's Alterhuman Writing Challenge asked alterhumans to "finish and publish at least one piece of writing a day, on your platform of choice [...] about or in connection to alterhumanity". This has inspired some alterhumans to post to their own Dreamwidth blogs and to the Alterhuman Community group on Tumblr.

Many different writing challenges emerged this November for a reason. Until this year, the most popular writing challenge was National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). People all over the world would push themselves daily to try to start and finish writing a 50,000 novel within the thirty days. The nonprofit organization for NaNoWriMo marred its 25th anniversary by announcing support for people using so-called artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms to write their novels for them. That take was unpopular because it would defeat the purpose of the challenge, among other reasons. Former fans organized many alternatives and resources for DIYing their own writing activities without AI or that nonprofit organization. These indie writers use other word count trackers, such as Track Bear. They use various other writing challenges, such as the one above.

AI-generated fiction story texts are problematic for many reasons. Their body of text comes from writers whose works were used without their permission. Training software in this way counts as fair use, but the output can end up being similar enough to the originals to result in copyright infringement and is recognized as plagiarism. Even text generation for bots such as ChatGPT requires such an absurd amount of electricity that the fad for AI is contributing to an energy crisis. Even though it has always been difficult for creative people to make a living, people who imagine that they can turn AI generated fiction into easy money have sent overwhelming quantities of it to magazines, wasting the time of the editors. Personally, I find no appeal in reading a story that hasn't had any heart put into its choice of words. Often, it's plain that no person even oversaw or proofread them.

Whatever you write for the Alterhuman Writing Challenge, you can proudly label your creations as "Alterhuman Made, Not AI-Generated" or "Nonhuman Made, Not AI-Generated" with these icons that Nova designed earlier this year. These were inspired by other graphics for labeling one's creations as having been made without AI. For example, Hinokodo's "Human Made" (released in December 2022, I think these were the first of these sorts of labels) and Lone Archivist's "Made By Humans" (August 2023). These earlier designs are good, it's just that their wording doesn't focus on calling out that its point is that it is free of AI generation, and doesn't align with how some of us creators want to describe ourselves. Both of those use human hand prints, so Nova's alterhuman/nonhuman spinoff of them uses paw prints.

If you have an account here on Dreamwidth or can take a minute to create one, yesterday I created a group,

alterhuman_writing. That community account is a place for us to share our essays, poetry, and other creative writing about being alterhuman. This month's Alterhuman Writing Challenge inspired the creation of the group, but it will continue to be a place for posting our writings all around the year.