The real kicker is it was and is used in productive and constructive ways. It was just invisible until very recently. The ability to search for other photos of your pets in your photos app, the spam filters that keep your email (relatively) usable, the special effects tools that let artists paint out wires were all possible because of machine learning (used to refer to the subgroup of AI) and were made better by transformers.

If this same tech were released in a post-Capitalist society there would be no need for every single company to ham fistedly shove it into every product that doesn’t need it.