I get some of the surface level reasons, and those annoy me too. Cramming AI into everything is dumb and unnecessary.
However, I do feel that at a deeper level, it has a lot of useful applications that will absolutely change society and improve the efficiency and skills of those who use it. For example, if someone wants to learn to code, they could take a few different paths. There are the traditional paths, just read or go to school and learn to code that way. Or you could pay for a bootcamp or an online coding education platform. Or, you could just tell an AI chatbot you want to learn to code, and have them become your teacher, and correct any errors you make in real time. Another application is in generating ideas or quick mock ups. Say I'm playing a game of d&d with friends. I need a character avatar so I just provide a description to the AI and it makes it up quick. It might take a few prompts, but it usually does a pretty good job. Or if I have a scenario I need to make a few enemies for, I could just provide the description of those enemies and have a quick stat block made up for them.
I realize that there are underlying issues with regard to training the AI on others work, but as someone who is a musician myself, and a supporter of open source as often as possible, I feel that it's a bit hypocritical for people to get upset about AI "stealing" work with regard to code or other stuff that people willingly put out there for free for others to consume. Any artist or coder could "steal" the work of others for inspiration for their work, the same as an AI does, an AI is just much more efficient about it. I do think that most of the corporations that are pushing some new AI feature or promising the world or end of the labor force is full of shit, and that we are definitely in some sort of an AI bubble, but the technology itself is definitely useful in a lot of ways, and if it can be developed on a more localized and decentralized scale (community owned AI hubs anyone?), it could actually be a really powerful and beneficial technology for organizations and individuals looking to do more with less.
You need to check your facts about the power consumption part
Certainly curious to see sources, but last I checked the industry was an insignificant contributor to electricity use overall. That number is obviously growing, but when I say insignificant, I mean negligible.
Again though, happy to see data that shows otherwise it you have a source to provide.
To elaborate on the power consumption a little... Current data centers are running at around 100+mw compared to the average household using around 1kw. A single center uses the power equivalent of town 20k-100k in population size. Meta is planning to build a data center that will run at around 2gw, which is a magnitude larger in power running over 1,000,000 GPUs compared to their current 100k+. So one DC is a larger city worth of power. In the grand scheme of the entire power infrastructure in the US, it may not register as something significant, but in the local areas they operate in, it's often more than the rest of the city combined.
Energy prices are already rising for people near data centers. Near me, the state is reopening a nuclear plant closed because the maintenance to repair years of use exceeded its value. With DCs moving in, it is now a necessity. As you mentioned, it's getting worse, but it's already having an effect.
There's also the insane water consumption required to cool their stuff. It's destroying ecosystems everywhere.
From a selfish-ish point, it's also already increased costs of chips used in RAM and GPUs and has taken stick off the market for consumers.
As far as your open source views, that's great, but open source projects still get licensed under open source licensing and is at the behest of the creator. Ignoring that is effectively stealing from creators and that's not okay. It's one thing to learn from something, and then to cite those sources, and it's another to take it, regurgitate it and not give credit. AI has been used to impersonate people in music and other media like content creators hurting their income and image with no recourse.
AI is ass at coding. It's not a good teacher and struggles with any level of complexity. It is ok for troubleshooting, but it has been shown in almost every case that it's not capable of replacing even junior devs effectively. AWS just had a coming to Jesus moment recently because AI generated code broke critical services and took down services that millions rely on. It's not security conscious, and there are breaches of personal data left and right.
I'm not saying all uses of AI are the devil. It has it's place for minor tooling, but the ethical implications mentioned above are just what I care to spend time elaborating on, but there are many more.