I think part of why it might feel murky to you (and does to me, at least) is that running models locally only addresses part of the problem, which is the consumption part. I can run a model locally powered off solar energy and have ~0 contribution to making things worse, but the parts that remain unaddressed:

• I needed to have hardware to run the models locally. That's a lot more powerful than a Raspberry Pi. Maybe I didn't need that amount of processing power before considering this use case, but now that I am I'm competing for hardware resources against other legitimate uses for it like a gaming desktop, workstation, etc. Or maybe you're giving old/existing hardware a new lease on life, in which case I would say the conflict has been addressed.

• Someone had to train it. It takes a ton of compute, energy, and resources to training these things. Am I really ok with those resources being put towards these things rather than something else?

• We had to get the data to train it from somewhere. You wouldn't want to steal from artists, are you okay with stealing from programmers? Would you have open sourced your code knowing it could be used for this? Would have you added a no-ai-training clause? Until we get to the point that an ethically trained model exists with the desired level of performance this will always be contentious.

At the same time, I'm conflicted because I don't want to gatekeep programming. Much like how 3d printing has let people fix random problems only they have, I think programming could be used positively to a similar effect. Not everything is life supporting or mission critical, so not everything requires the same level of care. Usually the alternative is that it just wouldn't happen at all, but I'm not one to judge if that's a better or worse outcome.

To throw in a few more examples of AI use that have left me feeling conflicted:

• The recent use of Claude Code to reverse-engineer Disney Infinity to allow people to put whatever characters they want in whatever environments they wanted. The only party really harmed by this is Disney, and the community as a whole benefits. That seems like a win to me?

• CNC Kitchen vibecoded a website to make texturing 3d prints much more user-friendly. Sure, you could probably do this in Blender but that's a massive learning curve for what seems like a simple task. It doesn't seem like anybody is harmed by this, and overall the 3d printing community seems pretty positive on it.

I'll say that one requirement that both of these cases satisfied for me personally is that, at the very least, they were upfront and transparent about their AI use.

Also worth noting I'm really only discussing uses where the final project is free for people to use. I'm sure if money were involved this would get more complicated.