AI is like nuclear weapons research. It killed a horrific number of people in unimaginably gruesome ways, and it rendered parts of the environment utterly uninhabitable for generations but we got mumble mumble fission power out of it so it's impossible to say if nuking live humans was a bad thing.

A nuclear bomb is just a tool, the people who use them are good or bad.

Sometimes tools in and of themselves are bad. They exist exclusively to do bad things and cause only damage, and on scales that are literally impossible for regular people to imagine. The consequences of using the tool are only bad, and last decades if not centuries.

There are no "peaceful" uses for nuclear bombs. We tried, and every proposal failed because they're nuclear goddamn bombs and the literal fallout ruins the environment for generations in fun and unpredictable ways.

A screwdriver or a hammer are tools that are morally ambivalent. The People Grinder 9000 is not, nor is the Copyright Launderer 2000.5 or the IP Theft Machine. Tools designed explicitly to do bad things are in and of themselves bad