So I'm curious — we're all here because we at least hate the current state of AI with hallucinating facts, being used to undress women and children, and all the fuckery that goes along with it.
I grew up watching Star Trek: The Next Generation, which takes place on a ship with a perfect AI that does everything right and basically does nothing wrong. It never hallucinates information; it's always right. It has never been used to undress people against their will; however, the Holodeck is kind of an extension of that and was used for that on Deep Space Nine, when operated by a Ferengi (capitalist alien race in a world where humans are communist). But the Enterprise holodeck would never do that. The shipwide AI also does not traditionally carry on conversations. The one time it does, the human was hallucinating — sort of. The doctor was in a pocket universe, people were disappearing, and at one point the AI told her she was the only crew person on the Enterprise, and no, that did not make sense, but that that was still how it was. Because, in her pocket universe, it was true.
So the question is... would you want a perfect AI that was incapable of lying or harbouring anything untrue? Basically you could ask it anything and it would give you the correct answer.
The one fault I can find with that fictional AI is when Data (the android), dressed like Sherlock Holmes, asked the computer to "create an enemy which rivals my intelligence." He meant to say Sherlock Holmes's intelligence, who he was cosplaying, but the computer made a self-aware malicious AI that got out of the Holodeck and tried to destroy the ship... because it was told to do so. Other than that, though.
...I'm not trying to mislead anyone, so I will drop the other shoe, answer the begged question now. I've always felt that to get to that level of AI, we need to wade through the shit we're in now. So yeah, before you ask, that's kind of the point of the thought exercise. However, I will also say that I do not think we will get to Star Trek AI, I think we will get to Terminator AI, destroying the world rather than lifting people up. I think maybe in the Star Trek universe, AI didn't really take off until people realised that war wasn't the answer, after WW3/the Eugenics Wars, and so they were making AI to make things better, not worse. We are not in that timeline. I look at what is happening now, IRL, and the timeline in the Terminator franchise, and it's clear to me that that one is more realistic.
That said, I still wonder if anyone would want AI if it did not have any of the problems.
Well now we have LLMs, not AI. And the Enterprise computer, advanced though it was, was also not considered a true AI. At the time of the Enterprise D I believe the only true AIs were Data, Lore, and for a brief time Lal.
Why was Data (and other Soonian androids) considered AI but not the ship?
I think the answer is "his positronic brain" but I feel like the Enterprise would have more than enough space to house one. It also successfully beamed Data up and down, so it could have also replicated one. (The phaser on kill/disintegrate, the transporter, and the replicator are basically all the same device.)
I forgot to answer the first part. That's the plot of the entire episode "Measure of a Man", and they even bring up the analogy of allowing the Enterprise computer to resign from Starfleet. Data is self-aware.
2 points to that, 1 it wasn't a question of "space" to house a positronic brain, no one else could create one. 2, while it could be transported one could not be replicated. Canonically some Star Trek tech was considered too advanced to be replicated. Why there was a difference between "can be transported" and "can be replicated" is a plot hole that has existed as long as Star Trek has so I don't think we need to address it here, heh.
Barring the one episode where it did because of outside reasons, when did the ship try to protect itself for its own sake? All those other times the auto-destruct sequence counted down when did the ship itself stop the countdown to protect its existence?