I'd agree with you if you mean that what has been marketed as AI to us is inherently bad. That said the word AI has been misused so much that is basically has no meaning. I've known researchers who have used things that can be called AI for really important research and it could run on a high end computer from 10 years ago. The externalities of that are quite minimal to what we gain. We really need to find language to discuss AI where when we talk about Big AI we're not also dragging the proven, and efficient models which are nearly AI but not quite into the discussion.

Perfectly put. I've expended paragraphs circling this succinct point.

It really depends on which externalities you're talking about

The only one I can think of as 'inherent' is the ethical concern over copyright. The others are more broadly related to the commercialization of the tool than to the tool itself.

I don't think it's inherently bad. We don't need to use double the world's energy to power it (as we see with open weight models) . We don't need to centralize it in trillion aire companies. We don't need to leverage an entire global economy on it. We don't need to use it to replace human labor without a proper economic model.

Those are all aspects of greed and stupidity. None of that is inherent.

I could say the same about all marketing, but that won't make it disappear