Thoughts on Historical Language Models and Talkie-1930

I've encountered several times an argument that goes something like this: corporations and other large economic or political institutions are the "original" AI agent -- slow and human-mediated, but with the same quality of non-human intellect and potential to impact the world through its non-human decision-making. It seems to me the essence, whatever it is philosophically speaking that we seem to "concentrate" into an AI model, may have first been distilled to a limited extent, when writing was invented.