Likes Computers can’t surprise by .
There is a quietly subversive move hiding in plain sight here.
The essay looks like it’s arguing against AI, but the more interesting thing is that it is actually redefining what writing is. Richard Beard is not saying “humans are better writers.” He is saying that memoir is not a genre at all. It is a cognitive act. Writing memoir is thinking in public, remembering in real time, selecting meaning from lived experience rather than assembling language toward an outcome.
That’s the pivot.
Most debates about AI and writing stay trapped at the level of output. Can it sound human? Can it sell books? Can it pass the test? Beard sidesteps that entirely. He reframes writing as a mode of consciousness, not a product. In that framing, AI does not “fail” at memoir the way a bad novelist fails. It fails the way a calculator fails at nostalgia. The category mistake is the point.
Once you see this, the Universal Turing Machine project makes sense. It is not a clever literary experiment. It is a defensive architecture. A way of designing reading and writing environments that privilege memory, idiosyncrasy, and non-linear association over coherence, persuasion, or market logic. It treats art as the gap, not the artifact.
There’s a second layer, even quieter. Beard is also indicting human writing culture. Creative writing programs, genre fiction, algorithm-friendly publishing, and even productivity-driven self-expression already trained writers to behave like language models long before AI arrived. The machines are not alien intruders. They are mirrors polished by our own habits.
So the essay is less a warning about machines and more a diagnosis of what happens when writing forgets that it is supposed to be a way of thinking, not a way of producing content.
The unsettling implication is this: the real threat is not that AI will replace writers. It’s that humans will stop writing in ways that require remembering who they are.
