The AI zombie market has been growing steadily. Schoolai caused a stir by unleashing an AI avatar of Anne Frank for classrooms as just one of their offerings of zombie historical figures for schools. In fact, there are now more outfits offering AI avatars for student use than I can even delve into here. Some are especially terrible; Wisdom of the Ages lets you chat (text only) with some big names of history, and within the first sentence, the Einstein avatar was talking about "he" rather than "I." Their "Adolph Hitler" also lapsed quickly into third person. Humy offers a Hello History app that promises all sorts of "engaging historical simulations" and an "in-depth and personal interaction with the historical figure of your choice." And don't forget the company that offers you the chance to take a writing class taught by a dead author.
Then there's this horrifying ad from 2wai that promises to keep zombie Grandma around so that generations of your family can enjoy her.
Good lord. And that's just one of many examples of the AI of Dead Relatives. I'm not sure what is worse-- the idea of dragging Grandma out of the grave or the idea that a few lines of code and some scanned letters and (2wai promises) a three minute conversation are all that's needed to capture a person's essence. No, actually, the worst part is that this encourages to understand that other people are only "real" to the extent that we perceive them and they reflect our expectations of them. These are simulations that amount to us speaking to our own reflections, empty images with no inner lives of their own. Simulacrums that exist only to provide us with an experience; voices that are silent except to speak to us. What the heck does that say about how we related to Grandma while she was alive?
Into this field of the damned comes Glenn Beck.
Beck claims to have the "largest private collection of American founding documents in the world, surpassed only by the Library of Congress and the National Archives in Washington, D.C." And now Beck has plans for those documents, and they don't involve handing them over to a museum. Instead, on January 5, 2026, he will launch the Glenn and Tania Beck Foundation for American History, a privately funded trust, to make his collection of over a million documents accessible to everyone.
It's the "next phase" of his career (post The Blaze), his "next disruption" and "creative venture." His foundation has created "the first independent, proprietary, AI-driven American historical library." It will come complete with its own AI zombie librarian named George, "built from the writings of George Washington himself. The writings of the Founders. The thousands of sermons that they heard from their church pulpits. The books that they -- they read. And the principles they lived by."
George is going to teach you the Real Truth, Beck promises. In fact, he guarantees that his AI will generate everything without hallucination or bias, which you might think is absolutely impossible for an AI (because it is), but Beck assures us that George is "contained within a secure, isolated server, where every document is memorized verbatim." Is there any other way that documents are stored on a hard drive?
This is not ChatGPT. This is not Wikipedia. This is verified, factual, memorized, first source truth.
Beck says that George will teach the Constitution, the Federalist papers, the civics. Beck says this project "will change EVERYTHING about education." George will counteract all those lies your teacher taught you. It's a proprietary AI database that will permanently preserve "the physical evidence of America's soul."
There are at least two possibilities. One is that George will be a Washington-lite AI zombie that will, in fact, hallucinate and spew bias just like any other AI because Beck doesn't know what he's talking about. The other is that George has taken an old version of Jeeves and slapped a tri-corner hat on him, and that this is just a digital library with a search function because Beck doesn't understand AI, but he knows that it's a hot marketing term right now.
At least three outfits claim to have worked on an AI Zombie George Washington (here,here, and here) and they are all pretty much baloney. It makes sense that AI hucksters are going to go after the low-hanging fruit of public domain persons for zombiefication, and it makes sense that Beck, a seasoned patriotic grifter, would follow that path.
But boy is this shit a bummer, because Beck is going to wave his Giant Library around and convince a bunch of suckers that he can tell them the Real Truth about our nation's founders with even more unearned authority than he already deploys. But if AI zombies are good for anything, it's grift, and we had better steel ourselves for more of it. And please, God, keep it out of our children's classrooms.
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