In a post-scarcity solarpunk future, I could imagine some reasonable uses, but that’s not the world we’re living in yet.
AI art has already poisoned the creative environment. I commissioned an artist for my latest solarpunk novel, and they used AI without telling me. I had to scrap that illustration. Then the next person I tried to hire claimed they could do the work without AI but in fact they could not.
All that is to say, fuck generative AI and fuck capitalism!
Yeah, and they should probably not use cars, or plastics, or make spaceships, or airplanes, or smart phones, or beanie babies. They shouldn't farm or hunt more than they need. They shouldn't make medicines either. They should do none of these things if preserving the environment is the number one concern. The issue is that there are billions of years of evolution driving us to explore and conquer, to learn and manipulate our surroundings, to do anything we can to stay alive and keep our lived ones alive. That couple billion years absolutely annihilates any vague notion of preserving the environment. I'm not saying it's a better idea, just that people are restless by design us all curling up into little balls and having minimal impact on the environment simply isn't going to happen unless something massively limits us.
If only there was some kind of compromise between "drawing comics and sewing clothes" and "burn down the entire amazon rainforest to generate apes"