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.
Imagine a shitty robot was just made available for free.
The shitty robot replaces you at work. It performs way faster with worse results, but the company hires a robot "expert" that fixes the results just enough that the product appears to be working. (Its not). You are now starving.
The shitty robot tells your kids that porn is a viable career path. And that they should kill themselves.
The shitty robot starts showing up everywhere, in advertising, TV shows, customer support lines, schools.
The shitty robot makes shitty art really fast, which people can sell or use how they want. Artists are now starving.
Imagine the shitty robot is now interviewing you for your next job.
Think of how shitty and scam filled the early internet was. Did we abandon it because of how shitty it was at first, or did we develop it and tweak it to it's full potential?
I mean, even Linus Torvalds acknowledges the benefits ffs
We did exactly the opposite of what you say, we monitized the scams and turned to entire internet into an scam-ad infested wasteland of the greed of 10 people at the cost of driving the rest of humanity to mindless addictions, grooming, and manipulating human psyche to eek out more money and mass-propagandize.
The majority of the internet is 10x worse than it was 20 or 30 years ago and there are literally more bots than people, according to research.