[dgb23]

It was the same clergy (or rather parts of it) that used the printing press to great success.

Martin Luther used it to spread his influence extremely quickly for example. Similarly, the clergy used new innovations in book layout and writing to spread Christianity across Europe a thousand years before that.

What is weird about LLMs though, is that it isn't a simple catalyst of human labor. The printing press or the internet can be used to spread information quickly that you have previously compiled or created. These technologies both have a democratizing effect and have objectively created new opportunities.

But LLMs are to some degree parasitical to human labor. I feel like their centralizing effect is stronger than their democratizing one.

[terminalshort]

Martin Luther was clergy, but he was absolutely not "the same clergy."

[bugglebeetle]

Everyone who tells the story of the reformation leaves out that Martin Luther also used this new technology to widely disseminate his deranged anti-Semitic lies and conspiracies, leading to pogroms against Jews, a hundred years of war across Europe, and providing the ideological basis for the rise of Nazism.

[dgb23]

You're right that later in his life he spread antisemitism and other terrible opinions as he was extremely elitist towards the peasantry. Definitely not a fan of that sort of thing.

But I didn't want to make a value judgement about Martin Luther's ideological legacy, but wanted to introduce some nuance into the narrative about disruptive innovation.