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Babies and children today are routinely subjected to avoidable adverse stimuli, such as circumcision and corporal punishment. That a typical parent can do this at will for no good reason, but a scientist wanting to do something similar to advance human knowledge must seek approval from an ethics board (which they would not get) is ridiculous.
Whatever "reasonable middle ground" you find, you'd have to make logically sound ethical arguments. This is what these people do for a living, and they are very well trained in those matters.
As programmers and engineers we are also trained in logic, use it every day. But that typically pales in comparison of what philosophers do. They deal with much richer logical systems and can precisely apply them to statements and arguments.
When applied to ethics, they typically end up with much more radical conclusions that we are dealing with here. In fact the resulting initiatives are already softened compromises and a "reasonable middle ground" before it even clashes with policy making.
Now the use of the results of that research...
Do you remember the drama[1] with Google's AI ethics team? Here's a sample of the "research" they were producing: https://s10251.pcdn.co/pdf/2021-bender-parrots.pdf
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timnit_Gebru#Exit_from_Google
I'd think that in light of all the problems we've seen with chatGPT "hallucinating" answers it reinforces their concerns about "stochastic parrots" more than anything.
I mean, if you have specific grievances, please do share them as this is an important conversation, but as of now your comment amounts to mudslinging and no substance.
It's all about whichever field the particular use-case belongs to, and would lose nothing by seeing the AI as a black box.
* IIRC there have been issues with models that find correlations being presented as finding causality. That is something that belongs to AI as a field; other people can't evaluate your stuff accurately if you've misinformed them about its capabilities.