I've never been so conflicted about a technology

AI might make things 1-2% worse, but we weren't suffering from a lack of legitimate content or media. We were suffering from centralized control and walled gardens force feeding us slop in the name of profit, the total enshittification of the internet without regard for the damage done - tragedy of the commons, maybe.

AI could also make things better, because it's no longer worth slogging through the bullshit with search - I'll have AI do my searching for me, or follow its recommendation directly, and never interact with any of the monetized bullshit the search engine tries to pawn off.

SEO content will have to get through ever more competent and discerning AI in order to get eyeballs. That eliminates a broad class of low effort trash, directly demonetizing bad faith actors.

So now you have content creators producing more plausible, but mediocre content, but OAI and other AI providers will have direct access to their logs - if they register someone as having had produced bulk trash content, they can shut down the account, report to authorities or other companies if there's some sort of fraud or illicit behavior going on.

There are competing pressures, and with Google also losing its monopoly on adtech, maybe we'll see companies forced to compete on quality products instead of exploitation of user data, all the while seeing the general quality of the internet improve.

Or maybe AI will just accelerate the race to the bottom and the internet's dead already.

When I AI code, it's more convenient for me to type in a prompt to change the name of a variable. This involves sending a request to the LLM provider, doing very expensive computations, and then doing a buggy job at it. Even though my IDE can do it for what 0.1% of the energy usage? Or even less? Try running an LLM locally on a CPU and you'll get a glimpse of how much energy it is using to do this simple task.

But coding with AI isn't that huge. What will become huge this year or next is MCP. It will bring "programming" to the masses, all of whom will do stupid queries like the above.

Consider this: I wrote an MCP server to fetch the weather forecast, and have separate tools to get a broad forecast, an hourly forecast, etc. I often want to check things like "I'm thinking of going to X tomorrow. It will be a bummer if it's cloudy. Which hours tomorrow have less than 50% cloud cover?" I could go to a weather web site, but that's more effort (lots of clicks to get to this detail). Way easier if I have a prompt ready.

OK - that doesn't sound too bad. Now let's say I want to do this check daily. What you have to realize is that with MCP the prompt above is as good as a program! It's trivial for an average non-programmer to write that prompt and put it as part of a cron job, and have the LLM email/text you when the weather hits a predefined criteria.

Consider emails. I sign up for deals from a retailer.[1] Now deals from them are a dime a dozen so I've been programmed to ignore those emails. But now with MCP, I can set a simple rule: Any email from that retailer goes to the LLM, and I've written a "program" that loosely describes what I think is a great deal, and let the LLM decide if it should notify me.

Everyone will do this - no programming required! That prompt + cron is the program.

Compared to traditional programming, this produces 100-1000x more CO2 emissions. And because there is no barrier to entry, easily 1000x more people will be doing programming than are doing now. So it's almost a millionfold in CO2 emissions for tasks like these.

[1] OK, I don't do it, but most people do.