I think The Lorax comparison is warranted for LLMs, hyping the race for AGI, and AI as marketing/branding, but the AI umbrella includes a lot of Machine Learning that's just practical, applied statistics.
A lot of ML applications aren't anymore resource intensive then using Lemmy. So I think the discussion about harms v. benefits of ai-- beyond hypers and doomers-- often diverges from conflating "AI" with these AI companies that are all-in on LLMs vs AI as a field that contains an over-hyped, over-invested, resource-intensive, subcategory bubble that needs to pop already as well as subcategories that make it easy and efficient to classify and cluster data.