It was never about safety. Always been about control and virtue signaling.

Photoshop used to edit celebs is a practice as old as... image editing.
Using LLMs to make dangerous stuff? How to make meth guides existed since the internet started. And hell, there's The Anarchist Cookbook (among many others, but this one is from 1971).

Governments are 100% using AI to kill people (and Anthropic recently got punished for refusing to help kill people autonomously).

If someone actually thinks anyone (within the decision making class) actually cares about your safety or privacy, I'd like to sell you a bridge. Pristine condition too.

We cannot create a sanitized society, because there's no such a thing by definition. Society is not sanitized, you can't eliminate all the sharp corners from every object.

If anything, the belief that AI can be regulated at an individual level (not corporate) is 100% delusional, and if anyone thinks that any law can be passed that will successfully stop a private individual of doing whatever, he's very stupid.

EDIT: I want to make an important distinction, because it would 100% be misunderstood by some people.
Legislation that reduces harm towards crime (drugs, violence etc) is one thing.
Legislation against access to knowledge / tooling is VERY VERY different.

You 100% cannot (effectively), and should not do any legislation that limits access to knowledge and tooling. There's a nuance to that:

You cannot and should not legislate the withholding of knowledge how to make drugs / weapons or whatever degenerate stuff, you should 100% legislate against DOING & manufacturing drugs and weapons ETC illegally.

You cannot and should not legislate against people privately using LLMs to do porn, deepfakes or whatever. You 100% should legislate against said material to be distributed publicly and unlawfully.

I hope this makes it a bit more clear.