There are costs to using all technology, including open source software. We can start with the obvious point that open source was never about "Free as in beer" and even the FSF says as much. Of course, the nature of open source makes not having "free as in beer" open source software difficult, RedHat Enterprise linux is clearly open source and yet it imposes a cost on its users.

As for environmental costs, electronics manufacturing is dirty business. Some pretty nasty chemicals go into the process of making every single piece of hardware you buy to run Linux. Never mind the sheer waste of electricity and energy that our modern "always on, always connected" world incurs all the time. Every single person running HomeAssistant while flashing ESPHome on all of their IOT devices is burning all sorts of electricity making their home "smart". Everyone running their 24/7 media server hosting a Jellyfin instance and a RAID array of spinning disks is burning away environmental resources all day long to allow them to have on demand access to videos we previously would have stored on unpowered storage media. How many raspberry pis, flipper zeros and other pieces of cheap tech have been produced with limited environmental resources and now languish in a drawer somewhere? How many gigabytes of data are needlessly shipped around the world, burning more energy, so that developers can have "cattle, not pets" for their servers and rebuild the whole docker stack from scratch every time? How many CI build pipelines pull all of their dependencies every single time from across hundreds of open source repositories? What about the environmental costs of the maker movement? Sure repairing your stuff is nice, but open sourcing 3d printing has almost certainly generated far more waste plastic than it has saved by allowing people to repair things.

And as for social costs, that just depends on you point of view. How many crimes are enabled by open source software like GPG and GrapheneOS? How about Bit Torrent, Tor and I2P? Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies? What is the social cost that the open source spirit that inspires VPNs like wireguard and proxy servers impose on countries and societies that would rather not have pornography or "dissident" material available? For that matter, what is the social cost imposed on the world by all the open source software that underlies every social media network and feed out there? Facebook and their algorithm might be proprietary, but open source software enables their scale and reach. How about the social costs of modern expectations for "free as in beer" software, that open source has very much contributed to? We talk about the mental health burden that is maintaining an open source project, and yet every time someone offers a piece of software for sale, HN threads are full of people griping about the price. RedHat tries to close the "free as in beer" holes in their business model, and people in the "spirit" of open source do everything they can to circumvent that. Prusa open sources their 3d printer designs and software, and the community shamelessly responds by undercutting them with cheap clones and knockoffs. And let's not even get started on the lionizing and hero worship of some of open source's less than stellar big names. Lots of people are or have been very famous and wield quite a bit of power and influence in the open source world and have shaped it for better or for ill and have advanced all sorts of causes some look askance at. Or they've set terrible examples of behavior and tone for the entire OSS community.

And then of course there's the ever present debate of whether the GPL or the BDS licenses are the ones that restrict or enable restricting the freedom of others. Never mind that the open source community is eternally wrestling with the question of whether or not you can or should impose limits on HOW open source software is used. Should an open source software project knowingly allow themselves to be used by a military organization? Does it matter if that organization is the IDF or the Ukrainian military? Does an OSS maintainer have the right to inject code into their project that they know is widely used as a dependency by other systems that prevents the software from working if it detects it's running in Russia and thereby restrict the freedom of those people to use the software?

Yes, AI has a cost. And you might decide that said costs are not ones you're comfortable with, or that they are higher than you want them to be. But no one should delude themselves into thinking that open source software in particular, or software and IT in general isn't FULL of these same costs and we've been waging battles over them for decades before now, and will continue to wage them for decades to come. AI is just another in a long list of controversial technologies which will change world for better or worse, just like every one that came before.