Agreed, I feel like the people who say no to AI weapons haven't actually presented a real argument (that I have heard) besides terminator bad

Regardless of whether AI is involved, many people simply don't want to work on weapons systems, or on non-weapons technologies that are intended to become part of a weapons system.

Thats fine, but a serious luxury belief IMO

Not really, it is fairly common belief. And American war system is not in the pro-democracy, defense only or whatever else business anyway. It is in pro-warcrime, pro-stupid-wars, pro-dictators business.

I think there's some nuance here that a lot of these convos dont make plain - are we talking about just using 'ai' in the military broadly, or are we specifically talking about fully autonomous weapons systems?

In the former case, I would agree with you completely, I havent heard any arguments beyond 'I dont like working on military stuff'. But if we're talking fully autonomous weapons, that's a different story. And further muddying the waters is the fact that the former is obviously a step along the path to the latter.