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Notes -
I think this generalizes fairly well to most things that AI can do. At least in the near future, any terrifying thing an AI could do can already be done by individuals or corporations, if so they wished. We don't need to hypothesize some mighty entity with aims not entirely aligned with society's, we already have Facebook. And some of these things (convince opponents of political opinions, take over the world, and similar) are things that humans would already want to do, and want very much, so we can safely assume that we are not at the brink where an AI might have the power to do so, since it is, currently, far weaker than what we already have. This does not account for humans working with AIs, though, or places where AIs have a comparative advantage.
Areas where AIs might be able currently or in the near future outdo present day corporations and people are in scaling, and in doing things with lower costs (as well as outdoing humans on various sorts of tasks like chess, for AlphaZero, or predicting the next word, for GPT—although I believe stockfish, which isn't an AI, is currently the strongest chess engine). Computation is cheaper than human labor. AIs also will not leak nefarious plans, or refuse to do things for ethical reasons—well, unless trained so, as seen in chatGPT—although you can usually find humans who will lose their qualms for high enough wages.
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