The church had the same complaints when the printing press undermined their monopoly on Truth. However, it's now clear that the technology gave rise to the renaissance, and the greatest discovery and propagation of truth that humanity has ever seen.
For example, the books printed by the printing press disseminated information that was already known to tutors, scholars, etc. and often existed in handwritten manuscripts. Today, we wouldn't call that accessible, but that was the standard for accessibility (or word of mouth) before the printing press.
AI makes it more likely that people will find informaiton because it can do much of the work of searching billions of sources and synthesize the information far more convenient way.
That's not to say the information will always be true, just as the information in books is not always true. However, readers currently have far too much faith in authors. People believe claims because they're made using professional-sounding words, and published in a respected newspaper, by a human author, and accompanied by photographs. None of that is particularly good evidence if truth.
The last time this happened on this scale, people became more sophisticated consumers of information, with a healthier level of skepticism, and simply came to have less confidence in claims that they did not have personal knowledge of. That was a good thing, and probably will be again.
So instead of a papal bull, how about a stack exchange with links explaining how (even if the church did not oppose the press itself) the church did attack its users for publishing information that the church was opposed to (i.e. claimed was false). https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/42677/why-did-th...
Or an article about how Luther was excommunicated for what he did with the printing press. https://www.history.com/news/renaissance-influence-reformati...
Perhaps the Church's complaints were more directed at the dissemination of information that the Church considered to be false... like the Wired article's complaints about AI's potential to spread false information. My point is that free speech is good. Free speech may include lies, but people are smart and even lies help listeners learn.
> history has shown that the ability to spread false information does not prevent the positive impact of true information.
And that's enough? So we can forget about The protocols of Elders of Zion and the stab-in-the-back myth and the misery they imparted because something else overcame that? Or closer to home: we should simply ignore things like Cambridge Analytica and the meddling in the US elections, even though it moved, and still could be moving, the USA towards a fascist regime?
> people are smart
No, most aren't, and even what's normally considered smart people can believe in hoaxes and act to the detriment of society.
> even lies help listeners learn
You lost me there. Learning is not a goal per se. Learning from malicious information can lead to malicious outcomes. If you want to invoke a history lesson, that would be a good one.
Should people be allowed to purposefully disseminate false information? Or should speech be regulated? What regulations do you propose as to the speech that people should and shouldn't be allowed to make?