The Double-Edged Sword of AI: Efficiency Gains vs. Environmental and Ethical Concerns

The rise of Large Language Models (LLMs) has brought significant improvements in developer productivity, as exemplified by the impressive performance of code editors like Cursor. However, the rapid advancement of AI also presents significant environmental challenges: massive energy consumption and data center construction negatively impact climate change. Furthermore, ethical concerns surrounding the sourcing of training data and the excessive consumption of web resources are cause for alarm, including the strain on Wikipedia servers and the generation of large amounts of low-quality content, dubbed "AI slop," polluting the web. After experiencing the convenience of AI tools, the author reflects on their negative impacts and calls for attention to the potential harms of AI, urging against its blind adoption.