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You are neither a good nor a bad person, due to working on nlp. You describe how bad entities could use your work (big corp in a given socioeconomic context), and then you assign blame to yourself. I find it strange you feel the need to have this discussion with yourself on a regular basis. It points towards you being good/soft/emotional/conscientious about others/emphatic.

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If you don't debate the merits of your work you aren't working on something big enough.

When I worked on h.264 and VC1, I knew what I was doing would do two things. By Making it cheaper and easier to create and distribute video the world would get more content creators.

The two things that all adds up to:

1. Greater Democracy of Content and More freedom of Speech Expression.

2. Dumbing down of content, more exploitation of people through extreme porn, gore, and bully videos.

I only work on things that can change the world, and anything that can change the world can have a negative impact as well, but I won't work on something that only has a negative impact.

And I can't see how working on nlp could possibly have "only negative impact", to say the least. Thus it seems strange your need to keep on thinking about that, and to solicit people to answer a "why am I bad?" q.

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