The controversy surrounding the capabilities of generative artificial intelligence is not a new phenomenon, but rather the latest manifestation of a historical pattern: an elitist panic at the prospect of true freedom for all. My first encounter with this resistance was not in a book, but in a Tanzanian newsroom in 2017.
A free, AI-powered tool, Grammarly, which was launched in 2009, could significantly improve the quality of our work and ease the burden on our overworked editors, yet it was met with reluctance and suspicion by many colleagues. They were, I believe, victims of a pervasive propaganda that dismisses any innovation that threatens to democratise privileges historically reserved for a select few.
This is the crux of the matter. The problem is not Large Language Models (LLMs) in themselves. As technologies, they are inert. The problem lies in the social and economic relations under which they are being developed and deployed.
When the primary motive is profit for capital owners, and the goal is to serve the interests of a few rather than the needs of the many, then any technology, no matter how revolutionary, risks becoming a tool of oppression rather than liberation. Our critique, therefore, should not be aimed at the technology itself, but at the social structures that determine its use.
Against the printing press
This elitist fear of democratisation is a recurring theme in human history. Consider the invention of the printing press by Johannes Gutenberg around 1450. For many, it was a miracle, a “holy art” that, as the bishop of Aleria, Giovanni Andrea de Bussi, noted in 1468, made it possible for even the poorest to build a library.
The humanist Benedetto Brugnoli observed that “twenty men may now print in a month more books than one hundred could previously have copied in a year.” But for the established elites, it symbolised a scandalous cheapening of knowledge.
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The Dominican monk Filippo de Strata, in a letter to the Doge of Venice written between August 1473 and December 1474, famously called the printing press a “whore” and the pen a “virgin,” demanding that printing be banned altogether. His stated reasons were concerns over the quality of texts and public morality, arguing that printers, in their pursuit of profit, were churning out error-filled, “bawdy and unsuitable volumes.”
However, as the historian Alexander Lee explains in his essay The War Against Printing, the real fear was the loss of control. The inaccessibility of hand-copied manuscripts, particularly the Bible, had kept the common people reliant on priests for interpretation. The printing press threatened this monopoly.
By making knowledge, including crude translations of scripture, available to the masses, the printing press empowered ordinary people to interpret the world for themselves.
As Filippo de Strata himself argued, the inaccessibility of the Bible “helped keep the common people on the straight and narrow.” Now that crude Italian translations were appearing, “even the most ignorant might feel emboldened to try interpreting God’s words for themselves,” risking that they “would be led far from the path of orthodoxy.”
The panic, you’d rightly conclude, was not about the quality of information, but about the democratisation of it.
Beyond technology
The pattern extends beyond technology to the very definition of rights and privileges. The expansion of suffrage has consistently been met with elite resistance. In the early United States, the vote was restricted to white male landowners, based on the principle that only those with a “stake in society” were fit to participate in governance.
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When women campaigned for the right to vote, they were met with a barrage of arguments from powerful men in the British Parliament. According to House of Commons records examined by BBC News, just months before the right was granted in 1918, MPs claimed that women were too “emotional,” too “impressionable,” and that giving them the vote would relieve men of their “responsibility” towards them.
Sir James Grant, MP for Whitehaven, bluntly stated: “Men have the vote and the power at the present moment; I say for Heaven’s sake let us keep it. We are controlled and worried enough by women at the present time.”
The arguments were a smokescreen for the raw desire to maintain exclusive power.
Even institutions we now consider pillars of democracy, like public libraries, faced resistance. As detailed in In These Times by Sofya Aptekar, public libraries were not always a given; “private libraries long circulated books among a paying elite” before public libraries emerged between 1885 and onwards.
The establishment of public libraries was a move toward the commons, “the closest thing to a socialist institution in the contemporary United States,” as Aptekar describes it, a step toward democratising access to information. The recent wave of book bans in the United States is a modern echo of this elitist impulse.
Local resistance to reforms
In Tanzania, too, we have continued to see how efforts to protect the interests of the elitist class, which primarily involves the ruling Chama cha Mapinduzi (CCM), the government, and its allies, have obstructed efforts to achieve structural and systemic reforms that would ensure pluralism and full democracy in the country.
We have seen how, for example, President Jakaya Kikwete, who used his 2011 New Year’s address to announce a long-awaited constitutional review, directly participating in thwarting the very process in 2014 when it became obvious that his class’s interests were not going to be assured should Tanzanians have the New Constitution exactly as they told the constitutional-review commission.
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As one analysis notes, what started as a promising reform effort with cross-party cooperation quickly descended into partisan gridlock, with President Kikwete using his inaugural speech before the Constituent Assembly to convey a partisan message rather than maintaining the independence he had initially promised.
It is these same reasons of protecting the interests of the few, and the fear of democracy and true freedom, that have stalled the reform and reconciliation process that President Samia Suluhu Hassan commendably initiated shortly after taking office on March 19, 2021, following the death of her predecessor, John Magufuli.
As the Institute for Security Studies reports, Samia “proudly championed the ‘Four R’s’ of reconciliation, resilience, reform and rebuilding” and initially ended Magufuli’s ban on political rallies and repealed repressive media laws, but by 2024, “the wheels started coming off her reform initiative” as she cracked down on opposition ahead of elections.
Stereotyping AI
In journalism, too, we see how established journalists stereotype AI by building the narrative that using AI in journalistic work is laziness, which speaks to their fear that perhaps now many people can do what these established journalists wrongly thought was reserved just for them.
We have seen also the government taking advantage of this desperation and frustration to tighten its control on media by passing the Media Services Act of 2016, which requires journalists to be accredited and issued with a press card by the government-controlled Board, with Section 20 of the Act making the press card mandatory evidence of accreditation, effectively making it illegal to practice journalism in Tanzania without government approval.
All these speak to the fear of a very small elitist group of people who feel like journalism should not be open to everyone, eventually preventing the full and total freedom that would serve Tanzanians’ best interests.
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This brings us back to generative AI. The technology holds immense potential to augment human creativity, automate tedious work, and democratise access to skills once held by a few. The fear among some journalists and editors that ChatGPT will make them obsolete is a modern-day version of the scribe’s fear of the printing press. It is a fear that the privilege of being a skilled writer, for example, will be accessible to all.
More significant danger
But the more significant danger, perhaps, is not that AI will liberate humanity, but that it won’t be allowed to. The development of cutting-edge AI is controlled by a handful of tech giants. As some experts have argued, Microsoft’s US$10 billion partnership with OpenAI, and Amazon’s up to US$4 billion investment in Anthropic are not just investments; they are a strategy to ensure that “digital dominance will be maintained.”
These tech giants control the cloud infrastructure, the data, and the capital, allowing them to “steer the technology in a direction that serves their narrow economic interests rather than the public interest,” the researchers write.
Therefore, the uproar around AI’s capabilities is a distraction. It is an elitist panic, rooted in the fear that a technology might actually live up to its promise of freeing people from toil and democratising access to knowledge and power.
The real fight is not, or at least should not be, against the algorithm. It should be against a social and economic system that sees a tool of potential liberation and immediately asks how it can be owned, controlled, and used to preserve the privileges of the few.
We must not let their panic become our own. We must demand that these new technologies be deployed not for the profit of a handful of corporations, but for the collective good of all humanity.
Khalifa Said is the Editor-in-Chief of Dar es Salaam-based digital publication The Chanzo. He’s available at Khalifa@thechanzo.com or on X as @ThatBoyKhalifax. These are the writer’s own opinions and do not necessarily reflect the viewpoint of The Chanzo. Want to publish in this space? Contact our editors at editor@thechanzo.com for further inquiries.
