it's a bit questionable to claim that AI can be done purely on renewables but painting can't, I think you're forgetting costs (of production, and of eco-friendly disposal (hah!)) embodied in the computing hardware
At 360 images/hour, you can generate 8640 images/day, 3153600/year. Realistically, no reason why the card shouldn't last at least 3 years, so that brings us to at least 10 million pictures.
Anecdotally, 10K sheets of paper per tree, so almost a thousand trees worth in just paper, before accounting for the other materials, the impacts of their extraction and logging and so on.
I think hardware wins there as well, and the more tech advances the more uneven it gets. Making paper and pigments is a purely physical thing, we're already about as good at that as we can be. And probably getting worse with time, as the most convenient mines of materials are exhausted.
> Realistically, no reason why the card shouldn't last at least 3 years
If you have 10k H100s, the failure rate is about 3-5/day. In numbers, that is $90-150k/day or ~11%/year (3*365=1095) on the low end. Of course a lot of these cards can go off for RMA and come back to life eventually, but this is being actually realistic about it. You end up having to manage a whole RMA program and it is a constant stream of cards in and out.
If you want to do the math, do it right. How many images are you going to draw by hand in a year? For sure not 3153600 ... When speaking about environmental impact, absolute values count, not relative ones!
