Training and running them consumes enormous amounts of energy,

Right now, using GPUs and unoptimized chips. Running and building other services like Google Search and YouTube also took enormous amounts of power and still does, though it’s vastly more efficient these days.

all the IP is within some gigantic monopolistic corporations,

This feels like a pretty knee jerk point instead of a well thought out one.

A) the biggest AI players are startups like ChatGPT and Anthropic which have gotten a lot of funding and attention but are neither giant nor monopolistic.

B) of the biggest monopolist companies (Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Meta), only Google and Apple are keeping their research closed, with both Microsoft and Meta publishing their models openly.

these corporations in turn push huge amounts of money into products that are not only bad, but dangerous (MS Recall or X’s porn generator AI),

Literally the vast majority of software developers already use copilot or a similar AI assistant. Bing search is genuinely useful for synthesizing answers and asking plain language questions with sourced answers. People are finding ChatGPT useful or they wouldnt be paying for it. DeepMind has literally discovered novel protein structures that we never knew existed before. And VFX artists like Corridor Crew are using it to make wild videos way faster than they ever were able to before. This feels like youre just cherry picking poor uses.

other corporations use AI as excuses to fire thousands of people and letting their core products rot away.

Capitalism does that with all forms of automation, whether it’s AI based, or just normal, run of the mill, software / machines. It’s how you end up producing the same products with less effort and manual labour. If you want to go back to hand milling flour you’re more than welcome to, otherwise automation is going to continue. The answer to automation lies in the government and social safety nets, not blocking automation technology.