In a surreal reversal that would amuse even Foucault, yesterday's AI evangelists—those who breathlessly extolled the virtues of co-creation, augmentation, and democratized intelligence—have become today's digital witch-hunters. Armed with AI detectors and moral indignation, they now patrol the boundaries of authorship, demanding ritual confessions: "Did you use AI?" We are witnessing the dawn of the AIquisition: a new orthodoxy of intellectual suspicion.

At its core, this is not a technological drama but an existential one. The rise of AI-generated text destabilizes the foundations upon which modern intellectual identity rests: originality, expertise, and meritocracy. When machines mimic fluency, the question is no longer what is true or what is good, but who deserves credit. The policing impulse stems not from principle, but from status anxiety—now that everyone can write like a Harvard graduate, the mystique of expertise begins to erode.

Psychologically, this is the revenge of scarcity. When the social capital of "genius" diminishes, those who once championed AI as creative liberation seek to reassert control by weaponizing "authenticity." Detection tools become instruments not of integrity, but of epistemic gatekeeping—more concerned with defending the sanctity of struggle than evaluating the value of insight.

Philosophically, this hysteria reveals a profound confusion between tools and significance. Like blaming a calculator for correct math, we confuse the medium with the message. Yet prompting is not simply plagiarism; it is a form of inquiry. Curation, exposition, and judgment remain irreducibly human acts. AI does not nullify creativity—a fool with a tool remains always a fool.

But let us be clear: If AI is used to fabricate expertise, to plagiarize thought, to generate content void of integrity or context, there is a problem and the social consequences are profound. But the real question is not "Did you use AI?" The question is: Did you use it well? With judgment? With courage? With intent? For the threat is not that AI will replace us, but that we will stop asking what makes us irreplaceable.

AI checkers, ironically, are machines pretending to arbitrate what is "human." They routinely misfire, produce false positives, and stifle talent. The cultural risk is chilling: a world in which excellence is suspect, fluency is penalized, and creativity is preemptively censored. We are not protecting meaning—we are pathologizing it.

We don't need inquisitors. We need curators. Thinkers. Critics. Writers who dare to wield the tool—but refuse to surrender their soul to it. The AIquisition, if unchecked, will not protect creativity. It will bury it under suspicion.

The pen is not the author, and we are not at the end of authorship. We are at its renaissance—if only we muster the profound wisdom needed to claim it well.