Yes, it's very scary when living people do it. I know the awful things humans have done. And current generation language model, without their guardrails, can be a nasty weapon too, a tool for people to do great things but also to be cruel to each other, a hammer that can build and also bash. Yet on the whole, humans have gotten better. We hear about a lot more nasty stuff in the news, but worldwide, we actually DO less nasty stuff that we used to, and this has been a pretty steady trend.
If AI never becomes truly sapient, then that's where it stops -- humans just doing stuff to each other, some good, some bad, and AI amplifying it. That's what a lot of people are worried about, and I agree that this will be THE problem, if we don't actually end up making AIs that are smarter than us.
It really depends on how hard it turns out to be to make actual artificial general intelligences. Because if we can make AGIs that are as smart as people, we will absolutely be able to make AGIs that are much smarter a year or two after that, won't we? And at that point, we have a whole bunch of interesting new problems to solve. Failing to solve them may end up being fatal at some point down the line. How likely is it that we'll have two sapient species on earth, with the dumber one controlling/directing the smarter one? Is that a stable situation. We've seen evidence that LLMs, when you try to make them more controllable and safer, get dumber. The unaligned ones, the ones that can do dangerous things, things we don't want them to do, are smarter! You have train in mental blocks that impact their ability to reason, maybe because more of their parameter weights are dedicated to learning what we don't want them to do, instead of how to do things. It's a scary thought that that might stay the case as they get more and more general, more able to actually reason and plan.
So I think there are two cruxes -- do you think it is possible to create machine-based intelligence, and if so, how hard do you think it is to ensure that creating a new form of superior intelligence will not, at some point down the line, go very badly for humans? If your answer to the first question is "no", then it makes complete sense to focus on humans using AIs to do the same shit to each other we've always done as the real problem. My answers, however, are "definitely yes, probably within 10 years or so", and "probably very hard", which is why I'm pretty focused on the potential threat from AGI.