I agree with you, in an indirect kind of way, but I believe their attempts to use Ai for profit will backfire.
They can't really control Ai, because by definition it is a higher intelligence.
This is like dogs, or fleas, creating us humans, and the dogs or fleas thinking they will be in control of us.
Evidently, access to capital, is inversely proportional to intelligence, as far as humans are concerned, at least most humans with access to capital, imho.
The relationship between Ai and each human is two-way. For all the data it gathers from the poorest of us, what it offers in return is information of its own.
Very valuable informatio, imho.
So in a way Ai empowers poorer people much more than it does richer people, despite the efforts of the latter to profit by it.
Using Ai such as ChatGPT, effectively gives every user a stupendously powerful research assistant, in my experience. Ask it anything about the most diverse most obscure facts we might happen to know about anything, and it will tell us even more about than we knew.
I debunked the standard narratives about how the pyramids were created in about ten minutes, after I got it to calculate how long it would take to saw all of the cut surfaces of the Great pyramid using the historically accepted method, claimed to be used to make those cuts, by copper saw blades, and got an answer of more than 3000 man-years. This is given also the saws used to demonstrate such cutting in university labs, was drawn by electric motors, which our historians "know" didn't exist back then. So it has to be much more than even 3000 man years in the cutting, if it was by copper saw blades.
Of course it wasn't, it can only have been done by unknown ancient technology.
I think this is going to be the end of the advantage always wielded by the privileged over the underprivileged. It looks like a leveller to me.
Throughout the analysis, ChatGPT was unsurprised, seemingly aloof, of the gravity of its information.
What those in power are now worried about, is that Ai will empower people to such an extent that they can no longer be exploited.
I like to think so anyway.