{"id":4563,"date":"2026-04-03T02:00:08","date_gmt":"2026-04-03T10:00:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/?p=4563"},"modified":"2026-04-02T20:26:19","modified_gmt":"2026-04-03T04:26:19","slug":"doing-the-work-for-the-sake-of-the-work","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/2026\/04\/03\/doing-the-work-for-the-sake-of-the-work\/","title":{"rendered":"Doing the Work for the Sake of the Work"},"content":{"rendered":"

Elizabeth Spiers did a recent piece in The Nation<\/i><\/a> on the anti-intellectualism of the broligarch crowd. It\u2019s worth a read for its own sake, but she started it with a quote that got me to thinking about why people make art:<\/p>\n

On Instagram, there\u2019s an activist named Brian Patrick (@pano.dime<\/a>) who has dedicated his account to \u201cposting an insane thing an AI executive said every day in 2026.\u201d I can\u2019t 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. \u201cIt\u2019s not really enjoyable to make music now,\u201d he said. \u201cIt 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\u2019t enjoy the majority of the time they spend making music.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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\u2019t get paid.<\/p>\n

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\u2019ve seen of his life and work talks about what a good time he had performing.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s 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\u2019t financially remunerative even if you get spectacularly good.<\/p>\n

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\u2019t understand this myself. If you want to make money, go into finance. You\u2019ll get a lot richer than 99 percent of artists and a hell of a lot richer than doing scam books.<\/p>\n

I mean, take the guy who used a chatbot to write a paid book review for The New York Times<\/i>. Getting paid to write book reviews for a prestigious publication is the gold standard for reviewers \u2013 who often work for free these days \u2013 and he didn\u2019t even care about the gig enough to do the work. And got caught, since the predictive software plagierized the Guardian\u2019s review of the book.<\/p>\n

(The chatbot can\u2019t read, so it didn\u2019t read the book. I suspect the reviewer didn\u2019t read the book either.)<\/p>\n

The things I value most in my life are precisely those things that require the work. <\/p>\n

Take Aikido, a martial art that does not hold competitions. There is no purpose in Aikido beyond training. You can\u2019t even earn trophies. I mean, you can get rank, which is a nice recognition but doesn\u2019t mean much anywhere else. You can become a teacher, but only a very few teachers are able to make a living from that \u2014 most teach for love of the art, not a paycheck.<\/p>\n

Aikido students train to get better just to train. It\u2019s for yourself, for your connections to others. That\u2019s the whole purpose.<\/p>\n

While some martial arts are competition driven \u2014 judo and Tae Kwon Do are even in the Olympics and competitive mixed martial arts and jujitsu hold all kinds of tournaments \u2014 an awful lot of people train in karate, Tai Chi, and various other forms just for the purpose of training.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

I will note that \u201cAI\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s the thing about writers: even when we bitch about writing, we like doing it. I mean, we often joke that we like \u201chaving written\u201d better than actual writing, but that\u2019s usually just on days when we\u2019ve been slogging through something complicated.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s piece and then, having thought about it some more, changing some stuff up.<\/p>\n

I like figuring out what I think about something and writing is a very good way to do that.<\/p>\n

Of course, I\u2019m someone who edits her emails and social media responses to make sure I\u2019d said what I meant to say. I want my words to mean something.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t even want \u201cAI\u201d to \u201cwrite\u201d 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\u2019m 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\u2019s on it, I want to be sure it says what I think.<\/p>\n

How can you let some software think for you, especially when it can\u2019t think?<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

I wouldn\u2019t 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.<\/a>)<\/p>\n

And anyway, like training in Aikido or singing in choir, writing\u2019s fun even when it\u2019s driving you batshit.<\/p>\n

I have no idea why the broligarchs can\u2019t understand that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Elizabeth Spiers did a recent piece in The Nation on the anti-intellectualism of the broligarch crowd. It\u2019s 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\u2019s an activist named Brian Patrick (@pano.dime) who has dedicated his account […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[626,21,20,17,18],"tags":[1174,72,780],"class_list":["post-4563","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-art","category-music","category-process","category-rants","category-writing","tag-ai-slop","tag-aikido","tag-the-nation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4563","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4563"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4563\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4564,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4563\/revisions\/4564"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4563"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4563"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4563"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}