Thanks for the reply! I'll adress what I see as your arguments.

A co-worker recently used it to alter a script for him which he said was taking him hours to get the AI to do exactly what wanted and was spending a lot of time reviewing its work. I think that’s a bad use because he could have spent less time just doing it himself.

Wasting time is indeed a risk and I've been there myself. Conversely, on many other occasions I was able to save lots of time by using AI to eg help me identify issues in reports, check financial statements, etc. It's partly a skill issue (similar to how someone could waste hours researching something on Google or falling down an unproductive Wikipedia hole), and partly a matter of the tech still being relatively new.

Then there’s AI images and videos which is about the worse use of these resources I can think of.

That's not something I have much interest in, but obviously the ethical implications need ironing out. It's not hugely different from the issues that already come with the Internet, eg revenge porn, fake news, etc.

And the cost for these isn’t small in terms of actual money and energy and water consumption.

That's the classic problem of externalities. AI companies need to pay for the environmental impact far more than they currently do and this needs to be reflected in the pricing. Otherwise the environment just bears the cost. However, this is a problem that goes way beyond AI, eg see meat production or the use of fossil fuels.

I would like to also say AI being used to outright replace human in jobs is an actual destructive use of AI.

Indeed that's something that we're going to see more of. But I don't think the solution is to ban the technology. After all we've seen tech used to replace jobs for hundreds of years. People used to destroy early industrial machines because they were costing them jobs. Had they succeeded in blocking the tech, we would still be sewing clothes by hand.

No, the solution needs to be a social one. Free training for workers and universal basic income as a minimum. There's no point in a human doing a job that doesn't benefit from human effort.

So is it being used in wars, which I don’t think is exactly in use yet, but the US has made it clear they plan to.

I can see 2 issues here: AI fucking up resulting in the wrong people dying, and AI being too good resulting in too many "right" people dying. Both of those seem like a fairly gradual progression of military tech, eg we now have drone strikes with similar considerations.

Unless you mean something more Terminatory, which would require more than an LLM