The problem may be that we went through this power consumption / CO2 generation argument with crypto mining, where there was a legitimate point to it. That feeling carries over that any new technology that burns a great amount of CPU cycles must be problematical. But it is a completely different situation with AI. AI's compute cycles are not doing essentially useless, unnecessary, redundant work. A better comparison would be with search engines, e.g. Google search, which must consume a whole lot of compute power and energy considering the size of its user base. Or Facebook, for that matter.