Elizabeth Spiers did a recent piece in The Nation on the anti-intellectualism of the broligarch crowd. It’s worth a read for its own sake, but she started it with a quote that got me to thinking about why people make art:
On Instagram, there’s an activist named Brian Patrick (@pano.dime) who has dedicated his account to “posting an insane thing an AI executive said every day in 2026.” I can’t stop thinking about his entry for Day 15, quoting the CEO of a company called Suno, Mikey Shulman, as he claimed that musicians hate the process of making music. “It’s not really enjoyable to make music now,” he said. “It takes a lot of time, a lot of practice, you need to get really good at an instrument or really good at a piece of production software. I think a majority of people don’t enjoy the majority of the time they spend making music.”
I mean, has this guy ever spent time around musicians? All they want to do is mess around with their instruments or their songs or jam with others. My own experience of music is mostly from marching band and church choir, places where you spend a lot of time in practice and don’t get paid.
And even the people who do it for a living also do it for fun. One of my favorite musicians, Joe Ely, passed recently, and almost every one of the many appreciations I’ve seen of his life and work talks about what a good time he had performing.
It’s obvious if you hang out with writers or artists or musicians or a lot of other people that many, many human beings love to do things that take a lot of work before you get good. And many of those things aren’t financially remunerative even if you get spectacularly good.
The only people using the predictive software labeled AI to do those things are people who want money more than they want to create. I don’t understand this myself. If you want to make money, go into finance. You’ll get a lot richer than 99 percent of artists and a hell of a lot richer than doing scam books.
I mean, take the guy who used a chatbot to write a paid book review for The New York Times. Getting paid to write book reviews for a prestigious publication is the gold standard for reviewers – who often work for free these days – and he didn’t even care about the gig enough to do the work. And got caught, since the predictive software plagierized the Guardian’s review of the book.
(The chatbot can’t read, so it didn’t read the book. I suspect the reviewer didn’t read the book either.)
The things I value most in my life are precisely those things that require the work.
Take Aikido, a martial art that does not hold competitions. There is no purpose in Aikido beyond training. You can’t even earn trophies. I mean, you can get rank, which is a nice recognition but doesn’t mean much anywhere else. You can become a teacher, but only a very few teachers are able to make a living from that — most teach for love of the art, not a paycheck.
Aikido students train to get better just to train. It’s for yourself, for your connections to others. That’s the whole purpose.
While some martial arts are competition driven — judo and Tae Kwon Do are even in the Olympics and competitive mixed martial arts and jujitsu hold all kinds of tournaments — an awful lot of people train in karate, Tai Chi, and various other forms just for the purpose of training.
It’s not exercise exactly, though it obviously is physically good for you. It is certainly about mastery, but not about mastery for any purpose beyond itself.
I will note that “AI” cannot do martial arts for you, though I suppose it can produce some fake pictures of you as a bad ass, which is not the same thing.
Here’s the thing about writers: even when we bitch about writing, we like doing it. I mean, we often joke that we like “having written” better than actual writing, but that’s usually just on days when we’ve been slogging through something complicated.
I was having a good time when I wrote this essay, which I did over a couple of days, starting with some notes after I read Spiers’s piece and then, having thought about it some more, changing some stuff up.
I like figuring out what I think about something and writing is a very good way to do that.
Of course, I’m someone who edits her emails and social media responses to make sure I’d said what I meant to say. I want my words to mean something.
I don’t even want “AI” to “write” comments on Federal Register notices or other official sorts of things that almost no one reads, because I want to be very clear about what I’m saying even if the subject is kind of boring. I even change up the letters that organizations I belong to ask me to sign on their behalf, because if my name’s on it, I want to be sure it says what I think.
How can you let some software think for you, especially when it can’t think?
I don’t get paid to write this blog. I do it because at least once a week I have a bunch of idea that are pounding in my brain that I want to put down in coherent form, and putting them out for others to read makes me think about them more deeply and figure them out.
I wouldn’t object to getting paid for it, but I need to do the writing more than I need to put in place one of the systems for getting paid. (If you want to pay me for writing, you can order my books from Aqueduct Press.)
And anyway, like training in Aikido or singing in choir, writing’s fun even when it’s driving you batshit.
I have no idea why the broligarchs can’t understand that.