That's the complaint? That if I make pictures for a few years, let's say on average 1 a day.. it will equal a small errand of carbon?

If anything now I feel LESS guilty about usage.

That study is from 2023 when the cost to produce 1000 images was 2.91 Wh per image. More recent numbers for Stable Diffusion's 2025 models that puts it at 1.3 Wh per image and that number continues to decrease.

For context that means a days worth of image generation emits about the same amount of carbon dioxide as a single transatlantic flight (New York to London). There are approximately 1500 transatlantic flights per day.

So every day the people of Vermont emit more CO2 just commuting than all image generation through OpenAI per week. Nice. That does put it in perspective. It’s really efficient.

1000 images is worth 4miles?

Ours cars are atrocious. We can have the most powerful artificial minds imagine 1000 images from simple prompts, and that takes as much energy as moving a human being 4 miles.

And that will get more energy efficient. Gas cars have barely budged.

Gas cars are the problem, not AI.

This is an embarrassingly idiotic article. They're comparing against the least intensive text model, ie some million parameter model nobody uses. Stable Diffusion is a 3.5 billion parameter model, while the GPT models a billion people are using for text generation are over 10 trillion parameters. To say nothing of the differences in average context size usage. The actual ratio of SDXL to text generation pollution is probably literally reversed from what the article claims by lying with statistics.

(Note, however, that OpenAI's image model is much much larger than SDXL; however, we don't have precise numbers for it. Nonetheless, misinformation is misinformation.)