In a post-scarcity solarpunk future, I could imagine some reasonable uses, but that’s not the world we’re living in yet.
AI art has already poisoned the creative environment. I commissioned an artist for my latest solarpunk novel, and they used AI without telling me. I had to scrap that illustration. Then the next person I tried to hire claimed they could do the work without AI but in fact they could not.
All that is to say, fuck generative AI and fuck capitalism!
If we want to address all of those, then we’ll need higher pollution taxes too. Going after only one abstract category of greed will encourage them to bullshit it into another category.
We’ve needed those for decades, it needs to be very expensive.