Of course there is some nuance to it. However, the massive ethical and environmental issues that come alongside AI and crypto usage just make any good use of them moot. Along with the fact that nobody is using them for those good uses, since those don’t rake in money, which is what companies want. People need to use their brains and need to think for themselves. AI is entirely antithetical to that.

I don’t think cryptocurrency has much benefit anymore since these days it’s not really an anonymous payment method and more of a get rich quick grift. Even for what people would consider the better coins out there. And corporate AI companies (and their models) aren’t much better either.

There’s some nuance of course, there might be coins that can still be mined by us mortals, though I don’t care enough to look into that. There are non-corporate AI models you can run on your PC which don’t have power impacts of datacenters, though the majority do not license training data, which many consider equally problematic.