I think this is a bad faith argument because it focuses specifically on chatgpt and how much resources it uses. The article itself even goes on to say that this is actually only 1-3% of total AI use.

People don’t give a shit about chatgpt specifically. When they complain about chatgpt they are using it as a surrogate for ai in general.

And yes, the amount of electricity from ai is quite significant. https://www.iea.org/news/ai-is-set-to-drive-surging-electricity-demand-from-data-centres-while-offering-the-potential-to-transform-how-the-energy-sector-works

It projects that electricity demand from data centres worldwide is set to more than double by 2030 to around 945 terawatt-hours (TWh), slightly more than the entire electricity consumption of Japan today. AI will be the most significant driver of this increase, with electricity demand from AI-optimised data centres projected to more than quadruple by 2030.

I’m not opposed to ai, I use a lot of AI tools locally on my own PC. I’m aware of how little electricity they consume when I am just using for a few minutes a day. But the problem is when it’s being crammed into EVERYTHING, I can’t just say I’m generating a few images per day or doing 5 LLM queries. Because it’s running on 100 Google searches that I perform, every website I visit will be using it for various purposes, applications I use will be implementing it for all kinds of things, shopping sites will be generating images of every product with me in the product image. AI is popping up everywhere, and the overall picture is that yes, this is contributing significantly to electricity demand, and the vast majority of that is not for developing new drugs, it’s for stupid shit like preventing me from clicking away from Google onto the website that they sourced an answer from.