I am having a similar sentiment change about our industry as well. The more AI's marketing plays purely on fear and shame, the more I want to see it fail. If Anthropic, OpenAI, and the other power players continue in this direction, I hope the graduation speech boos are just the start.
In the last few months I seem to have gotten some kind of amnesia. Or woken up from a dream. Because now it seems like The Tech Industry has just been a rotten, festering wound of Ads, Surveillance, entertainment addition, and Privacy Invasion for over a decade. Like what have I liked reading about on this Venture Capital site? New tools, open source, ideologically motivated tech. Not three variations of a startup that is either harmful or useless, or a startup that is genuinely useful and then gets bought by Big Tech, absorbed into the Ad/Surveillance/Addition Tech Blob for the “talent” and then the product closed down. Or whatever.
But AI now, harruph. Definitely making it all much worse, and while gloating about it too.