In my opinion they are not just as bad. I’ve found small local models do a very good job of solving various small problems, while using minimal energy. At worst they’re just regular bad. If you think mass data collection without consent to do stuff is a problem then its time to stop using just about any internet product with recommendations like YouTube or search engines as they all track data and scrape websites. There’s always a line and I feel the ongoing bad actors that are AI companies that have growth at any cost and already made local models are wildly different in the evil scale.