Will Bunch: Is AI's authoritarianism a bigger threat than Trump's?

[Nevilledog]

https://www.inquirer.com/opinion/ai-advances-anthropic-claude-20260219.html

No paywall link
https://archive.li/a2fkR

Like every other beleaguered top editor in a big-city newsroom these days, Chris Quinn — who leads Cleveland.com and the print Plain-Dealer — has to deal with assaults from all sides.

In March 2024, Quinn briefly became a darling of the online left (not easy for a journalist to pull off these days) with a bold manifesto for how Cleveland.com would deal with one of those many threats: An authoritarian president who despises a free press.

“We tell the truth, even when it offends some of the people who pay us for information,” Quinn wrote that fateful spring in his “Letter From the Editor” column. “The truth is that Donald Trump undermined faith in our elections in his false bid to retain the presidency. He sparked an insurrection intended to overthrow our government and keep himself in power. No president in our history has done worse.”

Less than two years later, Quinn has gone viral again. But this time, instead of resisting a powerful force aiming to upend American life as we’ve known it, he’s embracing one: The power of artificial intelligence (AI) to transform the workplace ... and just about everything else.

*snip*