They’ll Use AI to Centralize Power. We Must Use It to Decentralize Resistance.

Fear consolidates. Freedom distributes.

Illustration by Abdel Mukhtar

By Trygve Olson

This is the sixth in the seven-part series, “AI vs. Autocracy: Seven Lessons in the New Battle for Democracy.”

Authoritarianism thrives on control.

And artificial intelligence — especially large language models (LLMs), predictive surveillance tools, and AI-enhanced information pipelines — gives autocrats somethi…