Is AI’s authoritarianism a bigger threat than Trump’s?

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.

Quinn has said that steep job cuts (more on those later) have left just a skeleton crew covering Cleveland’s far-flung exurban counties, and using an AI tool to write stories based on the downsized staff’s reporting will result in more articles about these potential news deserts. When an anonymous college journalism student withdrew her application to Cleveland.com because she said she couldn’t work in a newsroom using AI to perform what was once a human task, the editor went off in his column.

“Journalism programs are decades behind,” wrote Quinn in arguing that technology is rendering such degrees as worthless. “Many graduating students have unrealistic expectations. They imagine themselves as long-form magazine storytellers, chasing a romanticized version of journalism that largely never existed.”

Seriously, how dare those young whippersnappers dream of creating beauty in their lives, instead of welcoming their new robot overlords and embracing their future as a cog in a faceless news machine?

But the dilemma facing Cleveland, Quinn and the Unknown Job Applicant is the crisis that’s been thrust in the face of all Americans as the brutal winter of 2026 slowly melts into spring and, it seems, a reality we’re truly not ready to confront — not practically, nor politically, nor morally.

People forget, but there was a brief moment in the mid-to-late 1990s when the internet was dismissed as a fad — clunky to use (remember dial-up?) and its abilities overhyped by Silicon Valley. But the internet radically changed how we live, as did the arrival of smartphones in the 2000s — not always for good. Yet these seem like the warm-up acts for the life-altering conniptions caused by omnipresent AI.

Suddenly, there’s been a flood of essays trying to warn us that whatever one initially thought about programs like ChatGPT — and yes, AI is still prone to “hallucinations” and other embarrassing errors — we need to adjust to the news that a new generation of AI tools is much more powerful, and better poised to replace many jobs.

“I am no longer needed for the actual technical work of my job,” an AI executive named Matt Shumer wrote in the most viral of these hot takes, titled “Something Big Is Happening.”

In describing how new AI programs rolled out by Anthropic, maker of Claude, and ChatGPT’s parent OpenAI can now perform complex coding tasks from the most simple instructions, Shumer warned the earthquake is coming to “[l]aw, finance, medicine, accounting, consulting, writing, design, analysis, customer service. Not in ten years. The people building these systems say one to five years. Some say less.”

This jibes with dire predictions from Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei, who has warned repeatedly of “painful” white-collar job losses caused by AI and said in his most recent long-form essay that the new technologies are “acting as a ‘general labor substitute for humans.’”

Is that bad? It sounds bad.

» READ MORE: In 2026, America needs an anti-AI party | Will Bunch Newsletter

The sweeping changes in the labor market are already starting, including a sharp drop in entry-level hiring for coders, who seem to be the canaries in this coal mine. January was the worst month for layoffs since the Great Recession of 2009, and analysts say job losses directly attributable to replacement by AI were a significant slice of that. The idea that wiping out millions of jobs might be bad for the overall economy even caught the ADD-addled attention of Wall Street for a day or two.

I don’t have space here to go deep on the technology, but everyone should take a moment to learn what “vibe coding” and “agentic AI” is, and read the New Yorker on the rise of Anthropic’s Claude or listen to a really good podcast explanation of AI and the labor market from the New York Times’ Kevin Roose. But we’re already overdue in addressing what this all means for everyday human existence.

The idea that eventually “everything you think, do, and say is in the pill you took today” — as Zager and Evans sang so presciently in their 1969 No. 1 smash, “In the Year 2525″ — has been with us for decades. But there was also a sense that robots performing the worst drudgery of the workplace might be liberating, creating more leisure time and space for human creativity.

So far that’s not what’s happening. Avoiding the poverty and depravation that would be caused by massive job losses would require a government willing to pay people a universal basic income (UBI), but the current government has instead been dismantling the existing welfare state. And the workers creating AI are sleeping in their cubicles.

And creativity may become a fever dream, not just for that naive journalism student with her “romanticized” visions of telling stories. Did you read the New York Times profile of the romance novelist who’s relying on Claude to crank out new tomes in as little as 45 minutes? Did you watch the lifelike short movie of an AI-generated “Brad Pitt” fighting “Tom Cruise”?

Let me get this straight. AI is taking our jobs and ending artistic struggle to liberate us...for what, exactly?

I haven’t even discussed the other really bad things about AI, including the drain on electricity from massive data centers likely to unleash yet another form of tyranny, unbridled climate change, and the death of critical thinking as reliance on AI decimates the classroom. At a moment when we’re just coming to terms with the downside of smartphones — such as higher rates of anxiety and depression among teenagers — could we learn to avoid similar mistakes with AI before they start?

And did I mention the whole “robots take over the world” scenario?

Dealing with all this would take political will. Yet leaders in both parties — Trump, for sure, but also top Democrats like Josh Shapiro and Gavin Newsom — have embraced the data-center and AI ambitions of their donor class even though the majority of their voters want strict regulation. A pro-AI super-PAC raised $125 million last year to buy the midterm elections. Who is fighting for the about-to-be-starving artists?

It doesn’t have to be like this. The same better-late-than-never push to remove smartphones from classrooms can be used as a model for eradicating AI in K-12 schools as well as college, to give the next generation at least a fighting chance to learn to think for itself. The politicians don’t have to allow data centers that burn fossil fuels instead of clean energy and consume the lion’s share of water available to the communities where they’re located.

Nor do we need to embrace the late-stage capitalist ethos that if shareholders make more money employing robots than human beings that some invisible law forces us to do this. Remember Chris Quinn back in Cleveland? The reason he feels he needs AI to write up the news is because back in 2019 he oversaw the layoff of one-third of his unionized newsroom, at the behest of the paper’s corporate parent.

Maybe robots are now “agentic,” but humans have always have agency. Here’s the perfect chance to use it, by encouraging the uses of AI that will be good for society — diagnosing sick patients and inventing medicines to cure them, for example — but regulating or banning the aspects of AI that will make life worse.

That’s partly up to the politicians, but it’s also up to us. Societal trends like the outbreak of “neighborism” — strangers forming new community bonds to beat back the fascism of immigration raids — or a rise in union membership are healthy signs that Americans are finally getting tired of technology driving us apart.

The fight against the authoritarianism of unchecked and often unwanted AI is the battle of the 21st century that will be waged long after the fight against political authoritarianism in Trump’s United States and elsewhere has been won.