From the Scholar’s Desk to the AI Cloud:
A Case Study in the Shift from Personal Knowledge to Universal Knowledge
by Beezone
“For us to know something, that which is known must be unchanging. Since material things change, there must be things that do not — suitable as objects of genuine knowledge, not just belief.”
— PlatoIn an age where AI transforms research into an ever-expanding, universally accessible archive, Plato’s vision of unchanging knowledge takes on new meaning. What once required years of personal effort to uncover now exists in a shared domain — knowledge no longer bound to the individual, but part of a collective, enduring whole.
Preface: Eight Years for a Single Book
In an age when information moves at the speed of a search bar, it is worth pausing to remember what it still takes to produce a serious work of scholarship in the old model.
Take Michal Bar-Asher Siegal’s Early Christian Monastic Literature and the Babylonian Talmud (Cambridge University Press, 2013).
Her acknowledgments trace the book’s origins back to her doctoral years at Yale, under the guidance of Christine Hayes and Steven Fraade. The project matured enough to yield articles in the Harvard Theological Review (2012) and Zion (2011) — milestones that themselves were years in the making.
A PhD dissertation in this field typically consumes four to six years. Transforming that dissertation into a Cambridge monograph adds another one to three years of editing, peer review, revisions, indexing, and proofing. By the time her book appeared in print, the research had almost certainly been underway since the mid-2000s — perhaps 2005 or 2006 — meaning that the “finished product” represented six to eight years of concentrated intellectual labor.
That is the old world (I still use it today) of scholarship: years of reading, note-taking, archival work, conference conversations, writing, rewriting, and shaping. It is a process measured not in quick submissions or one line queries, but in often painstaking ordeal of time, energy, and attention which is challenging and a demanding experience that requires enormous effort. And it is precisely this model — this slow, personally owned labor — that AI now has the capacity to compress into days; while taking away ownership and weakening authenticity.
When Michal Bar-Asher Siegal published Early Christian Monastic Literature and the Babylonian Talmud with Cambridge University Press, the book bore her name on the cover — and rightly so. It was hers in the fullest academic sense: years of intellectual labor, sustained focus, and the orchestration of an enormous scholarly network.
Her acknowledgments list 63 people — mentors, colleagues, editors, friends, family — each of whom contributed expertise, encouragement, or practical help. These are not symbolic gestures; in serious research projects, each named person marks a conversation, a reading suggestion, a manuscript critique, an introduction to a key archive, or the sharpening of a particular argument.
Her bibliography contains 464 references — each one a book, article, or source she found, read, and integrated into her argument. These references are the visible record of thousands of pages turned, highlighted, annotated, and filed away in memory or note form. They represent weeks in libraries, hours on online databases, and days lost in footnote trails. The work spanned disciplines, languages, and centuries. It required conversations at conferences, drafts passed back and forth, editorial reviews, and hundreds of hours in libraries and archives.
This is the “old model” of scholarship: a long, deliberate process of assembling and shaping existing knowledge. And here we must be honest — almost all scholarship is, in one sense, compilation. Siegal’s book builds on other books, which themselves built on still older books. It is the constant copying, interpreting, editing, and re-presentation of ideas. The originality lies not in conjuring something from nothing, but in finding a new angle, a fresh arrangement of well-worn materials, and expressing it in the scholar’s own voice and style.
Her conclusion — the polished final chapter — is both a personal statement and a public artifact. It carries her signature style, her intellectual framing, and her craftsmanship. Cambridge’s imprimatur adds institutional weight. The book then enters the cycle again, becoming one more title on the reading list for graduate students, one more citation in future bibliographies, one more brick in the wall of accumulated knowledge.
The Old Model: What It Takes
To reach this point required:
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Years of sustained reading, notetaking, and thematic sorting.
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Learning and applying multiple ancient languages.
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Mastery of two vast textual corpora: the Apophthegmata Patrum and the Babylonian Talmud.
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The ability to track and identify parallels across traditions and geographies.
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The intellectual and rhetorical skill to decide what matters, what to exclude, and how to frame the argument in a way that changes the scholarly conversation.
It is not the possession of raw facts that marks the scholar in this model — it is the path taken to assemble, weigh, and arrange them. The scholarly identity and the work are fused. The final book is as much a testimony to the author’s personal journey through the material as it is to the conclusions drawn from it.
The New Reality: AI
Here is where the old rhythm breaks. The months and years it once took to:
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Locate and cross-reference hundreds of sources
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Scan vast corpora for thematic or linguistic parallels
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Assemble bibliographies and trace intertextual connections
…can now, in many cases, be done in hours or days by AI tools.
A large language model can sift the Apophthegmata Patrum and the Babylonian Talmud for verbal and thematic overlap in seconds. It can pull the same 464 references from online databases in minutes. It can format, categorize, and even summarize them before the scholar finishes a cup of coffee.
What AI cannot replace is the human sensibility — the ability to weigh evidence in historical context, to imagine the social world behind the text, to decide which parallels matter and why. Nor can it replace the artistry of framing an argument, the subtlety of prose style, the sense of pacing and emphasis in a final chapter. Those are human achievements.
But now, the very raw work of research — once the slow proving ground for doctoral candidates — can be outsourced to machines. And that raises unsettling questions: when AI can gather and organize sources anonymously, what happens when those results are claimed as “original” by someone who did not labor through the years-long process? How will the value of authorship change when the barrier to producing a book-length “study” is not years, but days?
From Personal Knowledge to Universal Knowledge
In the old model, the identity of the scholar was inseparable from the work. Early Christian Monastic Literature and the Babylonian Talmud is not just “a book,” it is Michal Bar-Asher Siegal’s book — built over years, with her voice, her interpretive decisions, and her place in a lineage of other scholars.
Her authorship signals more than intellectual property — it signals personal authority. Readers know: here is someone who has done the work, turned the pages, weighed the evidence, and joined the scholarly conversation in good faith. The academic system of citation, peer review, and institutional publication reinforces this link between the person and the work.
AI erodes that connection. It accelerates the gathering of knowledge to such a degree that the labor of knowing — once visible in the scholar’s career path — becomes invisible. The skill shifts from long-term accumulation of sources to short-term orchestration of tools. The result is that the final product — a book, essay, or even an artwork — can emerge without the visible signature of years-long personal effort.
In this new environment, knowledge becomes universal not because it is open-access, but because its origin becomes untraceable. The “who” behind a work matters less than the “what” it contains. Anyone with enough mastery of AI tools can, in days, generate what appears to be the product of decades of deep study.
At first, this will be resisted. The old model depends on the person — their reputation, their originality, their cultivated point of view — as the guarantor of value. A Cambridge University Press monograph, like Siegal’s, still carries the weight of this personal-authorship system. But over time, as AI-generated works enter the same reading lists, get cited in the same bibliographies, and shape the same conversations, the distinction between personal and universal authorship will blur.
The irony is that academic knowledge has always been a collective palimpsest — a copy of a copy of a copy, arranged in a new frame. AI simply makes this visible and speeds the process until ownership becomes less about creation and more about curation.
The Coming Challenge to the Established Order
This shift from personal knowledge to universal knowledge is not just a matter of changing research techniques — it strikes at the heart of the order that governs how knowledge is validated, owned, and transmitted.
For centuries, scholarly authority has been built on a chain of ownership:
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The individual author produces an identifiable work.
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That work is vetted by institutions — universities, presses, journals — which grant it legitimacy.
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Copyright law protects the work as the property of its author or publisher.
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Peer consensus affirms its place in the canon, making it a reference point for future scholarship.
This system relies on the assumption that knowledge is traceable to a person — a name, a career, a voice. AI destabilizes that order by making it possible to produce works that appear to have the weight and authority of the old model, but whose origins are opaque and whose “authorship” may be little more than the orchestration of existing materials.
The guardians of the old order — editors, peer reviewers, university committees, copyright lawyers — face a profound dilemma. To acknowledge the legitimacy of AI-assisted or AI-generated works means accepting that the foundational link between the scholar’s identity and the work’s value has weakened. To reject them outright is to deny the reality that much of the labor of knowledge-gathering has already shifted to machines.
In this new world, the question will not be Who owns this knowledge? but How is this knowledge arranged, used, and trusted? Authority will shift from the creator to the curator, from the name on the cover to the network of verification around the content. The consensus-building mechanisms of academia, publishing, and law will need to adapt — perhaps radically — to a reality in which language and literary expression are no longer the property of individuals, but part of a shared, global reservoir of universal knowledge.
The transition will not be smooth. Those who came of age in the old order will defend the primacy of personal authorship as the anchor of scholarly value. But as AI-generated knowledge seeps into syllabi, bibliographies, and archives — indistinguishable from works of traditional scholarship — the very concept of ownership will have to be reimagined. What has been mine will increasingly be understood as ours.
Epilogue: The Return of Rhetoric
If AI is destined to transform research into a universal, shared reservoir, then the role of the human scholar will not vanish — but it will change. The most enduring value of human authorship will lie not in possessing knowledge, but in embodying it.
This is where rhetoric returns.
In the ancient world, from the Athenian agora to the Roman forum, from rabbinic academies to medieval disputations, knowledge reached its full power when spoken aloud. The art of rhetoric — the disciplined craft of public oration — transformed information into persuasion, connection, and action. A scroll in a library might contain wisdom, but it took the voice of the speaker to ignite it in the hearts and minds of an audience.
The old academic model, with its years of research and solitary writing, preserved this tradition only faintly — in the lecture hall, the conference presentation, the viva voce defense. But as AI collapses the timeline of research and levels the playing field of access, the ability to speak knowledge into being will become a distinguishing human art once again.
For in rhetoric, the scholar’s identity is not hidden in footnotes — it is alive in tone, cadence, gesture, and presence. An argument delivered with clarity and passion cannot be automated in the same way that a bibliography can. The speaker’s voice is not just a conduit for facts, but a vessel for values, judgments, and the subtleties of human conviction.
To meet the challenge of universal, non-owned knowledge, we must teach — and relearn — the art of public speech. This is not nostalgia; it is necessity. Without rhetoric, knowledge risks becoming a cold, infinite archive. With rhetoric, it becomes a living exchange, capable of stirring wisdom, shaping communities, and guiding action.
If the old order of scholarship is passing, let the next order be one in which knowledge is not merely stored but spoken and embodied — where the human voice reclaims its place as the meeting point between learning and life.
Prof. Michal Bar-Asher Siegal is a scholar of rabbinic Judaism. Her work focuses on aspects of Jewish-Christian interactions in the ancient world, and compares between Early Christian and rabbinic sources. She is a faculty member at The Goldstein-Goren Department of Jewish Thought, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel, and was an elected member of the Israel Young Academy of Sciences.
Her first book is Early Christian Monastic Literature and the Babylonian Talmud (Cambridge University Press, 2013, winner of the 2014 Manfred Lautenschlaeger Award). Her second book is Jewish – Christian Dialogues on Scripture in Late Antiquity: Heretic Narratives of the Babylonian Talmud (Cambridge University Press, 2019, a finalist, National Jewish Book Award (2019).)
In this talk, Prof. Bar-Asher Siegal shares with Alex Tseitlin of KEDEM her fascinating findings about Christians and Jews relations in the few first centuries of their existence. Her findings shed a different light on this epoch, and expose a fierce inter-religious debate, as well as surprising cooperation. Books by Michal Bar-Asher Siegal (affiliated links) Early Christian Monastic Literature and the Babylonian Talmud https://amzn.to/3BGUStw Heretic Narratives of the Babylonian Talmud https://amzn.to/3I00P8T .
KEDEM is an educational channel dedicated to the academic study of the ancient near east. Our mission is to provide scientifically based views and in-depth analysis about our topics of interest. Our host, Mr. Alex Tseitlin has already interviewed hundreds of globally renowned scholars and experts in his Hebrew channel (youtube.com/c/AlexTseitlin), about the history, archaeology, culture, and languages of the ancient near east – Assyria, Babylon and Egypt, with an emphasis on the history of Canaan and Ancient Israel.