What the printing press did was rapidly increase the amount, type, range and speed of information spread. That was a qualitative difference. The Church did not build its empire on restricting that, because before printing press, it was not even possible (or conceivable).
My overall point wrt. inventions is this: yes, it may end up turning for the best. But at the time the invention of this magnitude appears and spreads, a) no one can tell how it'll pan out, and b) they get all the immediate, bloody downsides of disrupting the social order.
Masses were often held in Latin, printed material was typically written in Latin and Greek, and access to translated texts was frequently prohibited or admonished. They tried hard to silence those like Wycliffe who made the Bible more readily available to the masses, and he was posthumously denounced as a heretic by the Church. They absolutely wielded information as a tool of oppression.
This is not a hill to die on, the historical facts are clear despite the efforts of the Church.
> What the printing press did was rapidly increase the amount, type, range and speed of information spread
Sure, but that's not the only thing it did.
Consider that at the time the printing press was first invented, books were by their nature often assumed to be true, or high quality, because it took an institutional amount of effort (usually on the part of a monastery, university, local government, etc.) to produce one. Bible translations were produced, but they were understood to be "correctly translated". This was important because if the Church was going to have priests go around preaching to people, they needed to be sure they were doing so correctly -- a mistranslated verse could lead to mistranslated doctrines &c, and while a modern atheist might not care too much ("that's just one interpretation") at the time the understanding was that deviations in opinion could lead to conflict. Ultimately they were right: the European Wars of Religion lead to millions of deaths, including almost 1/3 the population of Germany. That's on the same scale as the Black Death!
And again, translations did exist before the Reformation: Even ignoring that the Latin Bible (the Vulgate) was itself a translation of the original Hebrew & Koine Greek., the first _Catholic French_ translation was published in 1550, and there was never a question of whether to persecute the authors. You might say, but that was because of the Reformation -- then consider the Alfonsine Bible, composed in 1280 under the supervision a Catholic King and the master of a Catholic holy order. Well before then there were partial translations too: the Wessex Gospels (Old English) were translated in 990, and to quote Victoria Thompson "although the Church reserved Latin for the most sacred liturgical moments almost every other religious text was available in English by the eleventh century". That's five hundred years before the Reformation. So the longest period you can get where the Church was not actively translating texts was c. 400 - c. 900, a period you probably know as the "Dark Ages" specifically thanks to the fact that literary sources of all kinds were scarce, in no small part because the resources to compose large texts simply weren't there. Especially when you consider that those who could read and write generally knew how to read and write Latin -- vernacular literacy only became important later, with the increase in the number of e.g. merchants and scribes -- such translations held little value during that period.
So fast forward to Wycliffe. Clearly, the Church did not have anything against translations of the Bible per se. What they disagreed with in Wycliffe's translation were the decisions made in translation. And as more of these "unapproved Bibles" began circulating around, they decided that the only way to curtail their spread was to ban all vernacular books specifically within the Kingdom of England, because that's where the problem (as they saw it) was. And it wasn't just translations -- improperly copied Latin copies were burned too.
Think about today, with the crisis around fake videos. On one hand you could that they distort the truth, that they promote false narratives, etc. You could try to fine or imprison people that go around publishing fake videos of e.g. politicians saying things they never said, or of shootings/disasters that never took place, to try and cause chaos. Yet who's to say that in a few hundred years someone -- living in a world that has since adjusted to a freer flow of information, one with fewer ways to tell whether something is true or not -- won't say "deepfakes &c are a form of expression, and governments shouldn't be trying to stop them just because they disagree with existing narratives"?
Of course we today see book burning as some supreme evil. But when you're talking about the stability of nations and whole societies, can you really say "how dare they even try"? If there were some technology that made it impossible for governments to differentiate between citizens, which made it possible for a criminal to imitate any person, anywhere, would you really oppose the government's attempts at trying to stop it from propagating?
> The alternative is that the incompant power structure instead benefits from AGI
Also, tangentially related, in what way is the current power structure not slated to benefit from AGI? That's why OpenAI and company are getting literally all of the money the collected hyperscaler club can throw at them to make it. That's why it's worth however-many-billions it's up to by now.
All you've done is explain why the printing press was so important and necessary in order to break down previous unwarranted power structures. I have a similar hope for AGI. The alternative is that the incompant power structure instead benefits from AGI and uses it for oppression, which would mean it's not comparable to the printing press as such.