'method' object has no attribute 'message_content'

Question

Attempting to create a discord bot and I am following the tutorial linked here. I am receiving the following error from line 14:

    intents.message_content = True #NOQA
    ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
AttributeError: 'method' object has no attribute 'message_content'

Here is my code:

from typing import Final
import os
from dotenv import load_dotenv
from discord import Intents, Client, Message
from responses import get_response

#Step 0: Load our token from somewhere safe
load_dotenv()
#Final decorator makes it so that this cannot be overwritten or have subclasses
TOKEN: Final[str] = os.getenv('DISCORD_TOKEN')

# Step 1: Bot Setup - activate intents
intents: Intents = Intents.default
intents.message_content = True #NOQA
client: Client = Client(intents=intents)

#Step 2: Message Functionality
async def send_message(message: Message, user_message: str):
    if not user_message:
        print('Message was empty because intents were not enabled... probably')
        return
    
    # The := "Walrus Operator" is used to prompt for input.
    if is_private := user_message[0] == '?':
        user_message = user_message[1:]
    
    try:
        response: str = get_response(user_message)
        await message.author.send(response) if is_private else message.channel.send(response)
    except Exception as e:
        print(e)

#Step 3: Handling the startup for our bot.
        
@client.event
async def on_ready() -> None:
    print(f"{client.user} is now running")

#Step 4: Handle incoming messages
@client.event
async def on_message(message: Message) -> None:
    if message.author == client.user:
        return
    
    username: str = str(message.author)
    user_message: str = message.content
    channel: str = str(message.channel)

    print(f"[{channel}] {username}: '{user_message}")
    await send_message(message, user_message)

# Step 5: Main entry point
def main() -> None:
    client.run(token=TOKEN)

if __name__ == '__main__':
    main()

I've found this issue in multiple forums with varying solutions dependent on the version of discord.py that's installed. For me, I'm running version 2.3.2. Additionally, I'm running python version 3.12.1.

• I've tried changing intents.message_content to intents.messages.
• Uninstalling and reinstalling the discord library.

Any ideas? Sorry if this is submitted incorrectly, I'm still new to Stack Overflow.

Answer 1

To summarize the solution(s) offered in the comments:

Intents.default is a method, so it must be called with parentheses. Errors with type annotations (: Intents in Sam's case) are not detected by python's code checker so it can mislead you to thinking the error is on another line. If writing type annotations, a tool like mypy can help detect errors.

Fixed line 13: intents: Intents = Intents.default()

All credit to https://stackoverflow.com/users/2288659/silvio-mayolo and https://stackoverflow.com/users/17030540/nigh-anxiety