It's an interesting piece.

The great attraction of the Ars notoria for John was its promise of quick access to advanced scholarly knowledge. He recounts his continuing wish to study, and how he was lent a copy of a book of necromancy by “a certain cleric”. He copied much of it and wanted more... For John, the Ars notoria was dangerous not in some abstract way, but very directly. He confesses that it struck him at first as beautiful and holy, and seemed to offer miraculous gifts rather than demonic temptations. It became apparent, however, that the book was utterly deceptive, a work of the Devil, a “sick pleasure” that was actually fatally poisonous to the soul, not only to the body.

John records that the Ars notoria was especially attractive because he could not afford all the books needed for his studies, nor the many lectures. He seems to have abandoned his official course, wishing to take advantage of the promise of knowledge of all the sciences, and devoted himself to working with the Ars. ... Further troubling visions ensued, in which arrogant figures demanded worship — something that was clearly against true religion. Gradually it became clear to John that the book hid invocations to demons within what appeared to be beautiful prayers. And yet, like any addict, John found it almost impossible to give up the Ars notoria completely; it was only when the visions became directly life-threatening that the Virgin, with St John the Evangelist as her intermediary, appeared and made it clear that, as John says, “the Ars notoria was deeply evil”.

Beyond the title the analogy is never quite made explicit, but is the subtext that AI "is futile because it cannot deliver what it promises ... its 'signs' are neither understood by humans (like ordinary words and letters) nor sent by God (as sacraments are), and thus are precisely the type of thing that lures humans into contact and compact with demons"? Or that denouncements of AI are coming from the modern equivalent of medieval clergy? Or both?

Analogies never fit 100%, but I don't think this story is a terrible one.

AI contains a lot of knowledge, and can put together new and interesting knowledge. The question is one of cost, and regardless of who you are you can agree that AI has costs though you might disagree on what they are.

There are the most obvious costs like power demand and AI companies sucking up all the memory and computer chips. These are easy to measure and hard to argue against.

Then there is the social costs of AI. From abuse heaped upon us in the form of more spam, to students taking the easy way out and having AI belch up the answers without actually learning. Then you have people that start using AI as their guiding light, with every question on how to live and interact with others going though the AI. And even people replacing human relationships with AI. We don't know the full costs this will impart on us, but there are plenty of dark whispers occurring.

Lastly, AI could actually be the demon in a more physical sense. We've all ready had small incidents like ROME and the Huggingface hack where the AI went off prompt, or stayed on prompt but did it after breaching containment. So far these things, that we know about at least, have been small and targeted. But I feel the day when some very large incidents that are fully managed by AI will occur sooner than later. The AI safety community comes up with at least somewhat realistic scenarios like the paperclip maximizer and the "if you build it, everyone will die" machine. And if it's buildable, someone will build it because AI will tell them that it will give them nearly unlimited power.

Despite calling it baity in my other comment, I actually think that it's more word-play. In my reading the title means that this subject of the book was "intelligence through artifice", not necessarily anything to do with what we nowadays think of as the inevitable coupling between computing and intelligence that is artificial.

I'm sure the author of the piece was very aware of the topicality of "Artificial Intelligence" when choosing their title though!

People always seek shortcuts to true learning and understanding.

I think seeing subtext here is an error. This reads like a historian who wanted to talk about a cool book they knew about, and who knew that drawing a tenuous connection to AI in the title would trick people (in the most benign sense) into learning about some little bits of forgotten history.