Tolstoy Didn’t Need AI, He Had a Wife
I was wandering through the anti‑AI tags and stumbled on this little shrine to “lone genius” suffering — a set of screenshots from X about Beethoven, Monet, Tolstoy, Helen Keller.
They all say the same thing: people are obsessed with romanticizing suffering and too lazy to learn how things actually worked.
Beethoven, or: you edited out the copyists
The line goes: “Beethoven was fucking deaf but yeah sure you need a robot to be creative for you.”
Beethoven did not sit in a cave, scratching notes on stone tablets with pure willpower. He had copyists, students, performers, patrons, publishers. Other humans copied parts, rehearsed them, played them, carried his scores into salons and print shops.
He had technology: pianos as hardware, staff paper and music printing as infrastructure, concert halls and salons as his distribution network.
His “deaf genius” depended on a material and social setup: someone paid for the room, the instrument, the paper, the food. Someone tolerated the difficult man whose job was “compose and be impossible”.
When you weaponize him against AI, you are not saying “be like Beethoven”.
You are saying: be like Beethoven but without the copyists, the publishers, the stipends, the social capital — and don’t you dare touch modern tools, because we like our suffering artisanal and aesthetically vintage.
An AI assistant in this context is not “a robot being creative for you”.
It’s the contemporary equivalent of a literate copyist and patient student who can iterate, expand, shuffle, and check things so that your brain can focus on the part only you can do.
The difference is that we actually see the AI now. The nineteenth‑century humans who did this labor for Beethoven were conveniently cropped out of the frame.
Monet, or: industrial‑scale impressionism with a staff
Another reply says: “Monet was blind by the end of his life when he created some of his most famous Water Lilies.”
By the time Monet is painting the big Water Lilies, he is a brand and a small industry. He has a purpose‑built studio, gardeners maintaining his carefully engineered landscape, assistants helping with canvases, materials, logistics, dealers and institutions lined up for the work.
He is not a starving, solitary “pure soul of art” standing alone against the void. He is embedded in a dense network of people and physical infrastructure that makes it possible for a nearly blind man to still produce massive, technically demanding works.
So when someone throws Monet’s failing eyesight in your face, the message is:
“This man painted while half‑blind; how dare you open an editor that autocomplete your code or a model that helps you prototype.”
Meanwhile, today’s creators are expected to be artist, marketer, accountant, social media manager, customer support, and production assistant in one exhausted body.
Monet offloaded a huge part of that work onto other humans and onto a physical setup custom‑built for him.
Modern AI tools are precisely what allow you to offload some of it onto machines instead of turning yourself into your own unpaid studio assistant.
Helen Keller, or: collective labor resold as individual moral purity
Then we get: “Helen Keller wrote a book without vision, hearing, touch, smell, taste, nor intuition but sure, live off ChatGPT and Midjourney I guess.”
Ignoring the cartoon‑level exaggeration, this is still dishonest.
Helen Keller’s “voice” was never just hers. It was always a we: teachers, interpreters, companions who translated tactile signals into language, editors who shaped those words into publishable text, publishers and journalists who crafted the miracle narrative.
That doesn’t make her less of an author. It makes her more obviously embedded in a network of human assistance and technological mediation — precisely the thing these memes pretend doesn’t exist.
So when people throw Keller at you as a moral weapon, what they’re saying is:
“We once extracted extreme discipline and pain from a single human body, supported by an entire support system. Therefore, you are morally obligated to martyr yourself in the same way — but without the support system.”
AI breaks this script. It makes it much harder to pretend that texts simply fall out of isolated souls. It forces you to admit that collaboration, mediation and tooling were always part of the process; now some of that mediation just happens to be automated instead of outsourced to an underpaid human whose name disappears from the cover.
Tolstoy, or: “War and Peace” and the unpaid DevOps wife
And then they bring out Tolstoy: “Tolstoy took six years to handwrite and revise War & Peace.”
This is supposed to be the ultimate flex. The implication: if you are not willing to do the same by hand, you’re lazy and undeserving.
Let’s talk about what they carefully edit out.
Tolstoy did not “handwrite War & Peace” alone in some saintly candlelit isolation.
Sofya Tolstaya — his wife — copied out the entire novel multiple times by hand. She managed manuscripts, kept track of versions, corrected, helped edit, handled correspondence, estate management, finances, and a household with a small army of children, all while repeatedly getting pregnant, giving birth, breastfeeding and raising their thirteen kids. She was his version control system, his project manager, his operations and his unpaid in‑house editor.
He, in turn, spent years emotionally brutalising her.
He repeatedly threatened to walk out on the family, making it clear that if he left, she and the children would be left without means to live.
Her labor, her time, her sanity were all consumables in service of his spiritual drama and literary output.
Every time someone romanticizes “six years of handwriting and revising”, they are asking you to do something specific:
Take on all that repetitive, unforgiving, invisible work alone, with no help, and call it virtue.
Feel ashamed for wanting a tool that can take over at least part of that workload instead of grinding your life down the way hers was ground down.
And notice what else disappears: Sophya’s authorship of the process.
Her role doesn’t get a statue, or a syllabus week, or a moral lecture. She becomes background noise to his legend — the legend that is then used to discipline you.
This is what you get when your knowledge of Tolstoy stops at a single high‑school textbook paragraph you barely skimmed. The gap between that and the moral certainty they’re swinging around is almost performance art.
AI assistance, in that light, is almost indecently honest.
You outsource the drudgery to a system that does not need housing, food, recognition, or emotional caretaking — and you keep the human stakes for the parts that actually require a human.
Compared to the Tolstoy setup, that is not moral decay. It’s finally refusing to build your “great work” on someone else’s unpaid, uncredited life.
If your argument against AI needs you to erase copyists, assistants, gardeners, interpreters, wives and entire support infrastructures;
if it requires you to turn very real exploitation into a soft‑focus aesthetic of noble suffering —
then your problem is not that people “rely on robots”.
Your problem is that you’re addicted to a fantasy where other people’s invisible labor doesn’t exist, and you’re furious that, with AI, you can no longer pretend it never mattered.
