The scariest thing about LLM's (imo) is some central power, such as a corporation or government, manipulating the truth for their own benefit. Open and locally runnable models are the only solution I can see. They're not without risks of course, but the risk of the centralisation of intelligence seems far greater to me.

That being said, could this local intelligence empower bad actors to do very bad things? Like, existentially bad things? It's possible, and that's scary too.

It's not simply that people will get a warped answer when they ask AI a question.

It's that AI will be given the command, and then generate the stories, post the comments to reddit, contact the PR firms, put marketing contracts out for influencer media, and more, like an army of yes men to rewrite the story.