I wrote a few days ago about Artificial Intelligence or AI. I found an article even more dimwitted than the first. This one is called "The AI Jacquerie and Our Cultural Gatekeepers," and it's by Shlomit Beck. I found it on the website American Greatness, dated November 9, 2025. American Greatness is supposed to be a conservative website in which thoughtful people post thoughtful pieces. That didn't work this time around.
There are several offenses in Ms. Beck's piece. To begin: she refers to human beings as "meatware." Maybe she's an atheist or materialist and believes that we are all just animated meat. She definitely gives out a Marxist vibe, referring to the feelings, experiences, and powers of the author as "means of production." She also refers favorably to "the democratization of writing ability" made possible by AI and unfavorably to what she calls "guild authors," presumably the gatekeepers of her title and an allusion to medieval guilds, which were, I think, part of the early middle classes, or what Marx called the bourgeoisie. In other words, they were city-dwellers, or people living inside--and keeping--the gates. Ms. Beck also expresses her desire to throw in her lot with "cultural peasants," an allusion, I guess, to medieval peasants as a kind of proto-proletariat. I guess she imagines that the invisible hand of The Man, like in Undercover Brother (2002), is keeping her down.*
The word jacquerie is in Ms. Beck's title. It refers to an uprising or revolt. She also writes about going over the walls of the city if she's not allowed in through its gates. Again, it sounds like she believes that these (imaginary) gatekeepers--guildsmen--are denying her entry. In short, I think she believes that she is entitled to be read and that well-placed people are keeping that from happening. This is essentially a conspiracy theory. (Let's get Conspiracy Brother in here to explain it all.) What she fails to understand, I think, is that merit is what will gain her entry. Democracy undermines merit. Democracy says that all things are equal, in other words, that all things are equally good. If you want what you write to be read and appreciated, it has to be good. And it has to be good as it issues from the human heart and mind. AI is not going to do that for you. Ms. Beck, who uses AI to think and write for her, seems ready to use it also as like a siege engine around the walls of the city. I'm beginning to think that the ranks of the AI-users are growing. How much longer before they break through the walls and drag all of culture down into the uniform gray sludge of democracy?
Ms. Beck certainly thinks highly of herself, referring to herself as a "scholar," asserting that she is "a pretty sophisticated consumer of literature," listing her credits, which include "about eleven" essays (about eleven essays--imagine!) and co-editorship of a book of essays by "the most important contemporary European author," finally hoping or believing that what she writes--or co-writes with AI--has some kind of merit. She even implies, through some kind of twisted logic, that she's in a category with J.K Rowling, the most successful author of the twenty-first century. If "The AI Jacquerie and Our Cultural Gatekeepers" is any indication at all of the "merits" of Ms. Beck's thinking and writing, I can see why she relies so heavily on AI. The rest of us who don't use AI have nothing to worry about. She is far from nipping at our heels.
And now it occurs to me that Ms. Beck wants two mutually exclusive things, for she wants both democracy and recognition of her supposed merits. She wants to stand with everyone and simultaneously above certain others. Maybe she has never read "Harrison Bergeron" by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Maybe she has never followed the idea of democracy to its logical conclusions.
The term "meatware" makes me think of a like term, "meat puppet," which seems to have a connection to science fiction, perhaps to The Puppet Masters by Robert A. Heinlein (1951). More offensive--and more dimwitted--than Ms. Beck's referring to us as "meatware" is this proposition: "Like meatware writers, the AI writes from what it has read." No, Ms. Beck, writers do not write from what they read. They write from human experience. Maybe you should try it sometime. You might meet with more success that way.
A final offense, and perhaps the most egregious (and the stupidest) of all:
God made the talented, and now He, through his angels Google, xAi, Anthropic, OpenAI, etc., has made it possible for all of us--talented or not--to express ourselves within the limits of our taste, education, and experience.
That idea is so bad that it's hard to believe that she's even serious about it. Is this supposed to be a parody of what AI-users think? Is it an attempt at some other kind of humor or irony? Or is that a sentence AI wrote for Shlomit Beck, thereby elevating itself heavenward? If Ms. Beck is responsible for that quote--she must be, she put her name to it--and she actually believes what she wrote, then I'm forced to go to a counter-quote by George Orwell: "One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool." (From "Notes on Nationalism," 1945.)
Now I'll go back to the blurb at the beginning of her essay, in which she or her editor writes:
AI has turned writing from a guarded craft into an open frontier, where creativity depends less on talent than on the courage to create.
Still further offenses. First, writing is not a guarded craft. Anyone can do it. In that way writing truly is democratic, no action needed by pipsqueak revolutionaries. Second, creativity does not depend at all on talent. Anyone, talented or not, can be creative. I would say that creativity is actually a mark of our humanity. (It sounds like Ms. Beck is calling to be read without having the talent to be read.) Finally, it does not take courage to create. That phrase--"courage to create"--is nonsense. Creativity flows naturally out of our nature and existence as human beings. Creation requires only the act of creating.
I'll conclude by writing that AI is not the threat and not a monster. AI is a thing, and the only real monsters in this world are human. The threat doesn't come from AI. We shouldn't be afraid of it. What we should be wary of--and stand up against--is stupid people and their stupid ideas. (If you're a Marxist and you're using AI to think and write for you, then you should receive a double-prize for stupidity.) We should also realize that stupidity is sometimes only a step away from evil--and is more often a suitable substitute. Stupid people will do what evil wants them to do. Evil sits back, relaxes, and watches the world burn.
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*I found the following quote in the online encyclopedia that is not yet written by AI: "The term ["The Man"] is used [. . .] by Peter Fonda's character in the [sic] Wild Angels [1966] in 'We wanna be free to ride our machines without being hassled by The Man'." Remember here the lyric from "For Pete's Sake" by The Monkees, "We gotta be free./We gotta be free." By the way, Diane Ladd, who died earlier this month, was also in The Wild Angels.
The angels of the title are members of a motorcycle gang, in other words human beings. Human beings will forever be infinitely closer to the angels--and God--than any machine. Anyone enamored of AI should remember that. He or she should also remember that certain things are God's alone, and no man or invention of man will ever do them. Below that, certain other things are man's alone, and no machine will ever do them. In that art is a creation of the heart and the mind, it is by definition made only by human beings, in emulation of God, and not at all by machines.
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Update (Nov. 14, 2025): I might have found the origin of Shlomit Beck's complaint in an article called "AI Is Driving a New Surge of Sham 'Books' on Amazon," on the website The Author's Guild, dated March 15, 2024. It sounds like that's what she's looking for and what the Guild doesn't want. Anyway, there is this thing and that in the article before the anonymous author gets to this sentence: "We are also lobbying for laws that would require AI-generated text content to be labeled and identifiable as such." I'm not sure how such a thing would work. It could mean an infringement on the rights of freedom of speech and of the press. Besides that, there are too many people who have too much at stake in a Wild West kind of environment for AI for there to be any alternative.
Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley
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