Same Song on a Different Stage - How AI Fears Have Played Out in History

AI in the NewsAI trends
Written by Sam Hardin

You've probably heard these talking points sometime in the last year or so.

  • Ordinary people can't be trusted to use this on their own. Making sense of it takes training and years of study.

  • Put it in everyone's hands and you won't spread knowledge, you'll spread mistakes, because people will take whatever it tells them as gospel with no way to check it. Something always gets lost along the way, and even the experts admit it gets things wrong.

  • What happens to the trained professionals whose whole job was to explain this to the rest of us?

Any of those lines would fit right into a column about ChatGPT. They're paraphrased here, but every one of those points was made more than six hundred years ago, in England, by church leaders arguing against translating the Bible out of Latin and into the languages people actually spoke.

The Original Script

In the early 1400s, the question came to a head at Oxford, where friars made their case in formal debate. The friars arguing against translation said that if laypeople read scripture for themselves, they'd be stepping on the teaching role of the clergy, the people trained to stand between the text and the reader. Untrained readers would misunderstand what they read and wander into error.

Around 1409, Archbishop Thomas Arundel turned that position into law with the Constitutions of Oxford, which barred anyone from translating the Bible into English, or even reading such a translation, without a bishop's approval. He even borrowed an argument from St. Jerome, the man who produced the Latin Bible in the first place, pointing out that meaning doesn't always survive the trip from one language into another, and that Jerome himself had confessed he'd often erred at it. Underneath all of it sat a plain stake in the matter: if anyone could read the book, the people who had always read it for them would matter a lot less.

The translators pushed back hard. About a century later, William Tyndale sat at a dinner table across from a learned priest who declared that people were better off without God's law than without the pope's, which is to say the church's rulings on scripture should outrank scripture itself. Tyndale answered with a line that, as John Foxe recorded it, has followed him ever since: "I will cause a boy that driveth the plough shall know more of the Scripture than thou dost." In 1536 he was strangled and burned at the stake for heresy, and his last words, as Foxe reported them, were a prayer: "Lord! open the King of England's eyes." That king had banned Tyndale's books in 1530. Within three years he had authorized the Great Bible, built heavily on Tyndale's own translation, and royal orders were putting an English Bible in every parish church.

Through all that, the case against translation came down to three worries. It goes around the experts, people will be misled, and the folks in the middle lose their place. Hang on to those, because they keep coming back.

Socrates Said it First, But Plato Wrote it Down

The oldest version of this argument I could find is about writing itself. Roughly 2,400 years ago, Plato wrote a dialogue called Phaedrus in which Socrates tells an old Egyptian tale. A god named Theuth shows King Thamus his greatest invention, the alphabet, and promises it will make the Egyptians wiser. The king wants no part of it. Writing, he warns, "will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories," and it hands people "not truth, but only the semblance of truth."

Socrates' bigger complaint was that a written page can't talk back, any more than a painting can. You can't ask it a follow-up question, it can't defend itself, and you can read it and walk away believing you understand something you don't. Swap the word "writing" for "AI" and you've got one of the most common worries teachers have right now about students and chatbots.

The irony has been noted for a couple thousand years, but it's still fun. The only reason we know Socrates' argument against writing is that Plato wrote it down.

Same Lines, Larger Stage

Gutenberg's press showed up in the mid-1400s, right in the middle of the Bible fight, and it ran the same script at a much bigger volume. Scribes, whose whole trade was copying books by hand, saw what was coming. A monk named Johannes Trithemius argued that printed books would never equal handwritten ones, and, in a twist Plato would have appreciated, his argument reached readers by way of the printing press. Church and secular authorities worried about losing control over what people read. In 1501, Pope Alexander VI threatened to excommunicate anyone who printed books without the church's permission, and unlicensed printing got treated as a source of dangerous falsehood, the 1500s version of what we'd now call fake news.

The critics weren't wrong that printing spread garbage. Propaganda, rumor, and outright lies rolled off the same presses as Bibles and scientific treatises. What's worth noticing is how that problem got handled. Nobody managed to un-invent the press, so people built new ways to sort good information from bad. Scholars leaned harder into tools like indexes and bibliographies, ways of showing where a claim came from and finding it again, and a lot of us still rely on them every time we judge whether something we read is trustworthy.

Opening Night for Today

If you're old enough to remember a teacher telling you Wikipedia doesn't count as a source, you've already lived through one of these. Wikipedia launched in 2001, and the criticism went straight at its founding idea, that anyone could edit it. The French writer Pierre Assouline summed up the complaint in a 2007 book preface, and in English translation it reads "a place where anyone can write anything."

The Encyclopaedia Britannica was held up as the trustworthy alternative because credentialed experts wrote and edited it, which put it in pretty much the same role the Latin Bible and its trained readers played six hundred years earlier. The worries about Wikipedia were real enough, too. Vandalism happened, errors slipped through, hoaxes sat unnoticed for years, and most readers had no easy way to tell who had written what.

Most of us kept using it anyway, usually as the first stop, scrolling down to the references at the bottom to see where a claim actually came from. Wikipedia's defenders made basically this case: when information was scarce and printing was expensive, you needed gatekeepers to decide what made it to the page; but when space is unlimited, what you need is a way to filter information transparently, with every edit and every source visible to anyone who wants to check.

Incidentally, this is also how oral traditions keep their stories accurate. If people know a story well enough because they've heard it a thousand times, then any of those people can catch an error when someone tells it wrong. It's a self-policing system that actually works.

Where the Critics Have a Point

Which brings us to AI. You can hear all three of the old worries in today's debate. It lets people go around doctors, lawyers, and teachers. It'll mislead people who can't tell a good answer from a bad one. It threatens the jobs of the people who used to stand in the middle. Some of that will probably age about as well as the Constitutions of Oxford, and some of it will prove to be valid.

One of those worries is especially valid today. AI tools can hallucinate, meaning they sometimes state things that are flat wrong with complete confidence, and you often can't tell from the answer alone. If you're making a medical, legal, or financial decision, taking an AI answer at face value without checking it is a bad idea right now. The technology isn't finished, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something. I build with these tools for a living, and checking their work is part of that job.

The people raising that concern are describing a real limitation of a tool that's still being worked out, much like the people who worried about printed rumors in the 1500s were describing something real.

The Show Goes On

Looking back across all of these, we see the worries and the tools tend to grow up together. The English Bible picked up centuries of commentary and study notes. The printing press got its indexes and bibliographies. Wikipedia got its reference lists and a public history of every edit. Each time, the fear pointed at a real gap, and the lasting fix came from people building something to close it rather than locking the tool away.

AI is early in that same story. The gatekeeping arguments will probably sound as dated someday as Archbishop Arundel does now. Hallucinations will keep being a real problem until somebody solves them, and we all need to be aware of them while we wait.

Tyndale wanted a boy behind a plough to know the scriptures better than the priest. Five centuries on, that boy's descendants carry a phone that will answer nearly any question they could think to ask. The work in front of us is making sure those answers are true, and raising a generation with enough skepticism and curiosity to still ask where the answers came from, but more importantly, what they mean.

Sam Hardin is the founder of Bright Pivot LLC, an AI automation and operations consultancy based in Covington, Louisiana. Bright Pivot helps small and medium businesses on the North Shore automate the routine and augment the rest.

Have questions about what this means for your business? I'd love to talk it through. Book a time on my Calendly, or reach me directly at sam@bright-pivot.com.

Sources (for your reference, not for publishing)

Sam Hardin
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