To be honest, this development is simply the logical consequence of applying the principle of profit maximization.
Unfortunately, technology has now reached such a scale that the people behind the spreadsheets are willing to sacrifice humanity itself.
That, too, is not surprising, because they will only realize their mistake when it is already too late.
Another example of the same principle is climate change.
I’m currently studying and gathering studies about language and cognition to see if LLMs could do anything to our culture. So far I’d lean to say that, yes, they could curate our words and thus alter the way we speak, write and think. Words are linked to our perception of reality somehow and given enough time our overlords could curate words they like, shadowban others and in that way interact with what we can communicate and think about.
Obviously there is a large group of people rejecting AI so they wouldn’t suffer from this.