I think it's intellectually dishonest to dismiss the absolute accumulation of human's knowledge under very specific brands for profitability using false equivalencies. When I build something using chatGPT, especially if I was unable to build it before, I arrive at a result that I could have previously arrived with "hard work" by skipping the "hard work" part.

Now, many will argue that you wouldn't have poured in time and energy in that endeavour anyways, so it's fine. But the crucial part missing here is the effort. We're about to witness the side effects of societal-wide reliance on LLM's, the same way we're still paying the price for the social media boom, misinformation, propaganda, echo-chambers and algorithmic bubbles.

Notice that none of the above actually invented misinformation, etc. they just magnified an existing problem. LLM's magnify the need to "get it done, fast" but I don't see the engineering excellence everyone promised me that I'll see at any level.

In the US, much of the woods are owned by corporations too. Those that aren't are, in theory, owned by the public, but the oligarchs work hard to hollow that out so that practically public lands are owned by them too.