OK, so thus far we've had two major AI winters, where after some excitement over new developments in AI, funding ended up more or less drying up for decades, because it didn't manage to go anywhere. I think a third such an event would go a long way in mitigating the harms from AI, because the AI space is currently very centralised, i.e. most users are very dependent on a handful of companies, and those companies are very dependent on continued investment. Also, running less capable open weights/source models locally has a fairly high barrier to entry and those models would become less relevant over time without the funding to keep up their training.

Thankfully for me, things appear to be moving in that direction.

As for regulation, I don't think I mentioned or alluded to it at all. If anything, that seems more your thing, since you think holding people doing bad things with AI accountable is sufficient. Personally, I do very much think that the world would be better off without these forms of AI. But if there is to be regulation, I would argue it should focus mostly on the suppliers and not so much on the users. Not only because otherwise you end up in an unsustainable game of whack-a-mole, but also because there's not always a user to hold to account. Like, if an AI chatbot encourages someone's suicidal thoughts and they end up doing it because of that, what AI user is to be held to account?

Every single communications advancement has pushed that more and more towards the people, and I think AI will still favor the people over the elites for propaganda

It's the opposite, this is very much a power-consolidating technology. It's not like, say, reading and writing, where nobody can just change the alphabet to become incapable of describing subversive notions or something. With AI, what it's capable of and what its biases are, is very much dependent on decisions of the people training and managing it. And because the cost of training a model the size of an LLM is so high, there are only a few entities that can afford to do that.

On top of that, people with good intentions cannot use AI at scale, because they need to verify all of its output. People with bad intentions, who don't care about the details, only that the waters are sufficiently muddied, can use it at scale. And if they are or are backed by the elite, then they have the funding to use it even more at scale.

I can literally put Trump’s face on a chicken with no skills.

Only because the elite are currently subsidising it for you. Because they want you to accept this technology. Because they know it empowers them more than it does you.

You don’t seem like the type that’d be advocating teaching kids how to use it

I'm pro-education, but to teach someone, there needs to be something that can be taught first.