Well... I'm quite on the fence about AI, after being against it for a while.

Your point stands. Current AI use is terrible: both the ecological disaster and mass theft they present are not small issues.

Yet these aren't a fault of the tech itself. They're the fault of the companies doing said theft, and the governments either silently or openly ebracing said theft. And economic bubble fueling the theft and the unprecedented rate of datacenters popping up.

I like to compare AI to photography. Both are/were revolutionary. Both killed jobs. Both raised copyright issues. Yet photography today is an integral part of life. And I'm afraid LLM chatbots will be as well in ad few as 15 years.

There's no stopping technological progress, even when it's actively blocked - let alone when governments feed billions into it and take a blind eye to all its issues.

So the case isn't as clear cut. You can admit defeat now, or you can wait a bit. You can be the sole hermit not using it in a world which does. Which is a personal choice for everyone. The only thing to ask is: is it the right one for an open source project?

Rejecting "known unethical" tools does seem like a sensible approach though. Either make your own, use a known-good one or do things the old fashioned way. No leaded gas in our vicinity allowed.