The negative externality you are worried about isn't AI, but pollution/carbon emissions. Tax pollution instead of deciding for other people what use case is worth it.
Edit: To be clear, I am all for this. I'd love to see a massive(!) carbon tax.
By contrast, the ai we have today is the worst ai it will ever be. Quality will go up with time, and price will go down, as incentives drive the development of better, cheaper models.
Algorithmic improvements are coming quickly in generative ml. We're still in very early days.
The world isn't static. Electricity is fungible, it doesn't matter what it goes to.
Machine learning has utility, not just in theory but to plenty of people, including me. It has helped me do my job faster.
You can put tax on energy from carbon, fine. There’s no justification for taxing energy intensive things by themselves because you don’t like using energy. Human energy usage is and should be growing exponentially (and not an S curve) besides occasional pauses when efficiencies are found (like LED lighting using something like 90% less energy than incandescent).
Fossil fuels are clearly going away anyway, not because of ideals either, solar is just way cheaper now.
People are funny on this forum, when it was Bitcoin it was the devil and now it’s helping us complete our lines of code it’s ok to require a nuclear power plant to run such a system? I guess whatever benefits the individual is ok ? Silicone valley types are funny too because it was all about developing fusion to save humanity now it’s about developing fusion to cat gifs?
These products need to be taxed to price in these externalities we can’t keep this up, it’s ridiculous.