I can see where you're coming from - however I disagree on the premise that "the reality is that (rationale) the control of AI is in the hands of the mega corps". AI has been a research topic not done solely by huge corps, but by researchers who publish these findings. There are several options out there right now for consumer grade AI where you download models yourself, and run them locally. (Jan, Pytorch, TensorFlow, Horovod, Ray, H2O.ai, stable-horde, etc many of which are from FAANG, but are still, nevertheless, open source and usable by anyone - i've used several to make my own AI models)

Consumers and researchers alike have an interest in making this tech available to all. Not just businesses. The grand majority of the difficulty in training AI is obtaining datasets large enough with enough orthogonal 'features' to ensure its efficacy is appropriate. Namely, this means that tasks like image generation, editing and recognition (huge for medical sector, including finding cancers and other problems), documentation creation (to your credit), speech recognition and translation (huge for the differently-abled community and for globe-trotters alike), and education (I read from huge public research data sets, public domain books and novels, etc) are still definitely feasible for consumer-grade usage and operation. There's also some really neat usages like federated tensorflow and distributed tensorflow which allows for, perhaps obviously, distributed computation opening the door for stronger models, run by anyone who will serve it.

I just do not see the point in admitting total defeat/failure for AI because some of the asshole greedy little pigs in the world are also monetizing/misusing the technology. The cat is out of the bag in my opinion, the best (not only) option forward, is to bolster consumer-grade implementations, encouraging things like self-hosting, local operation/execution, and creating minimally viable guidelines to protect consumers from each other. Seatbelts. Brakes. Legal recourse for those who harm others with said technology.