Fuck AI

Yea I think you're onto something there with the weird and toxic inertia here. Part of that, I suspect, is that the kind of work and profession that was previously doing the sorts of things that AI will be used for now, namely Data Science and similar, was already a nebulous profession already in transition, which could be simply wiped away over 2-5 years of AI hype. That is, there may literally be no "going back" because what was done before, in many cases, will have been institutionally forgotten or pushed out as a career people are willing to invest in. Which would mean, as you say, whatever persists will cling to the whole AI thing in some way however corrupted and disingenuous.