This is a valuable point, but for a variety of reasons, I think it also makes sense to compare the carbon emissions of these AI activities not just to the carbon emissions of direct alternatives like a human making a drawing, but also just to other seemingly unrelated activities. A good number of us who use an LLM to edit some text or a diffusion model to generate an image weren't going to generate a similar text or image by some other means - I might instead have left the world without that text or image, and played a video game, or posted on social media, or gone for a jog, or brewed some tea. I actually don't know the ranking of those four activities in terms of carbon impact! (My suspicion is that the jog is lowest and the tea is highest, but I could be very wrong.)
One other reason not to just compare it to "comparable" activities but to get a sense of its absolute ranking compared to apparently unrelated activities is that once AI makes a type of activity easier, we are likely to either do a whole lot more of it (Jevons paradox) or possibly a whole lot less (if the possibility of AI doing something devalues the thing).
This is a valuable point, but for a variety of reasons, I think it also makes sense to compare the carbon emissions of these AI activities not just to the carbon emissions of direct alternatives like a human making a drawing, but also just to other seemingly unrelated activities. A good number of us who use an LLM to edit some text or a diffusion model to generate an image weren't going to generate a similar text or image by some other means - I might instead have left the world without that text or image, and played a video game, or posted on social media, or gone for a jog, or brewed some tea. I actually don't know the ranking of those four activities in terms of carbon impact! (My suspicion is that the jog is lowest and the tea is highest, but I could be very wrong.)
One other reason not to just compare it to "comparable" activities but to get a sense of its absolute ranking compared to apparently unrelated activities is that once AI makes a type of activity easier, we are likely to either do a whole lot more of it (Jevons paradox) or possibly a whole lot less (if the possibility of AI doing something devalues the thing).