Another way to think about this is that every day ChatGPT uses a typical US family’s electrical consumption for 65 _years_. That’s the better part of a lifetime and they’re doing it to make computers less reliable.
The difference is that social media is a worldwide communication network connecting billions of people from all over the globe to each other while text generation bots exist to circumvent labor protections and make a handful of obscenely wealthy executives even more obscenely wealthy.
This is just the “but about the energy waste of the banking industry!!!!” defense of shitcoins all over again. The waste product of the banking industry for 7 billion people versus an equivalent waste for an unregulated casino populated by a few hundred thousand gambling addicts.
An individual post is essentially adding some records to a database. That's vastly less processor-intensive than neural net queries. The reason people are concerned is because LLMs etc. are distinctly power-consumptive compared to most other computing activities (blockchain excluded).
