> The net benefit for humanity may turn out to be positive or negative - it's too early to tell.
It's just a tool, but it is unfortunately a tool that is currently dominated by large-sized corporations, to serve Capitalism. So it's definitely going to be a net-negative.
Contrast that to something like 3D printing, which has most visibly benefited small companies and individual users.
Like many things (general purpose computing, the internet) we can carve out our own space once something is released into the public sphere so I don't think Capitalism has the iron grip on this that you're hypothesising. In recent memory I think it's mainly social media where the corporations have mostly succeeded in keeping a firm hold on things and where it remains hard for users to subvert their aims. And that's largely because of the failure of decentralized social media to grow to a mass audience.
I think AI is different. "Good enough" models are already available under generous licenses, fine-tuning and even training is within the reach of groups of volunteers etc etc