There are indeed sides in this fight
I recommend checking out Bruno's post about how the current moment in tech is, in fact, a conflict, a fight between groups of people, with sides. Choosing to use AI is a political act, and it is not possible to separate the technology from the cultural, economic, political, public health, or climatological context this technology occupies. You cannot casually participate in the advancement of this technology and come out truly clean.
It is fundamental to not understand the current moment as just the adoption shock of a new technology. The technology itself is harmful; but the tech corporations pushing it want to ensure it is an engine of dependency, surveillance, and monopoly.
The people who promote this technology, the people who deploy this technology, are themselves taking a side. It is not a neutral act or a matter of personal convenience. It's signing up to fight, and to fight on the side of those who very nearly knocked of Brazilian democracy a week and a half ago; on the side of new gas turbines; on the side of everything being choked with slop; on the side of total semiotic dissolution.
Like Bruno I have seen friends and sometimes even mentors I admire and used to trust get super into LLM usage, and it's extremely depressing. I make a new bad discovery about someone I care about probably once a month.
I lose a lot of respect for people who could easily choose not to use it, but use it anyway. However, I definitely lose even more respect for people who choose to materially advance the technology at a big tech company.
This includes people who delude themselves into thinking their presence will mitigate the constellation of corrosive cultural, economic, climate, social, health, etc. factors I mentioned above. The weird ideologues who are running these companies are not going to take your advice. They are not going to make the technology less harmful. The scale of the harm is so vast - and so securely planted on vast sources of unimaginable wealth and investment - that you cannot meaningfully mitigate it as a worker or even as a leader within any given company. If you think you will have an impact, you're simply dumb. If you think I'm talking about you, I am. You're just dumb.
I spent a lot of time thinking about how I wanted to finish this short post but I've run out of things I can say without becoming extremely uncivil. I will just finish up by saying that America is uniquely good at creating the kind of eager nerd whose ego feasts on disciplined attainment, career progress, and the esteem they get from advancement within an institution or a field. I have been this kind of person, in the past! But the last ten years have taught me to really hate them. It's loser behavior. You do not actually need to be a leader in a tech company to take care of your family. At a certain point, you're probably just in it because you've fully replaced your identity, your core self-worth, with your sense of adjacency to power.
If I could cure these people of their addiction to positive OKR reviews, glass desk obelisks, and positive regard from powerful people, I would. Unfortunately, it's a problem they'll have to solve on their own.