I don’t remember which sf story it was, and the idea has probably appeared in more than one, but in some novel or story I read years ago, a super-intelligence had the ability to commandeer a person’s mind in short order by fuzzing the human subject.

At the time I thought, this makes a nice story but by necessity, a human mind is extremely resilient to this sort of hijack. Now, I am not so sure; I think the story only got the time scale wrong. The AI could complete the task in seconds, while now it’s possible in a few months. As much is compressed and elided in stories of any type, I now realize that essentially, the tale was correct, and we can see that evidence all over and have been able to for a while.

The fossil fuel industry fuzzed billions of humans for years to make them believe global climate change was not real. The tobacco industry did the same thing. Other industries are now undertaking similar tasks, and have been for many years.

Oh, sure, it doesn’t work on all humans all the time, but in the real world it works on enough of them enough of the time (and partially works on everyone all the time) that the long-ago sf story was more accurate than not. A fuzzing-based brain hijack is possible, and can wreak great destruction. We can see the results of that all around us now.