Why are they so threatening?

Simple example: A lot of artists would like that their images aren't used for AI training and would like to have legislation to prevent that. Problem with that is that such legislation would grand a monopoly on AI to the Google's, Facebook's and Adobe's of this world, as they are already sitting on mountains of data and have ToS that allows them to use it for training. Any Open Source project that doesn't have the data and would need to web scraping would be illegal.

That's the issue. A lot of criticism on AI is extremely short sighted and ignorant, often not even understanding the very basics how it all works.

Another more fundamental problem: What are you going to do? AI is just a collection of algorithms and math. Do you want to outlaw math? Force humans to use less efficient tools? Technological progress is not something you can easily control, especially not in advance when you don't even know what changes it will bring.

Imagine if we had taken an extra five minutes before embracing Facebook and all the other social media that came to define “Web2.0.”

We did and nothing ever came of it. Projects like https://freenet.org/ or https://freedombox.org/ have been around for a decade or two. But the masses want convinience.