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.
I don't, not in general.
There are good and bad uses of AI. For example I used AI to generate my profile picture here on Lemmy (would you have noticed?). In general the creation of art is one of the best uses of AI I can think of; it doesn't have serious consequences if it goes wrong, and it can easily be reviewed by a human whether it looks as it should.
But using AI to make actually meaningful business decisions without any human review at all? Using AI for customer service? Any company that does that deserves VERY negative consequences.
I don't agree with talking points like "AI companies should be required to pay copyright holders of their training data" or "AI is bad because of the environmental impact" or "AI is bad because of RAM prices" or "AI companies should be legally responsible for any mistakes the AI makes (such as libel or encouraging users' suicide)" or such things; I think all of these are nonsense.
I believe in general that AI gets too much attention in the media. It's really not that impactful.
Glad to see some sanity for once on here. It's definitely not all good, but it's not all bad either, and when people attribute all the evils of the world to it, they are being disingenuous.