>> It's too bad people spend energy for generating them now.

How do you mean?

Some quick back of the napkin math.

Creating a 'throwaway' banner image by hand, maybe 15 minutes on a 100W CPU in Photoshop:

  15 minutes human work time + 0.025 kWh (100W*0.25h)

  5 minutes human work time + 0.01 kWh (600W*(1/60)h)

It all depends on the scale you use. At the individual, sure. But it's like cars. They keep getting more effecient, yet total energy consumption keeps increasing.

The further we can go, the further we will go.

The more CPU power we get, the more JS heavy websites get.

The more images we can generate, the more we will generate.

The more we can do, the more we do, whether we should or not.

You can't take the human energy in account, because there's no reason to believe they won't live for the same amount of time and use the same amount of energy regardless.

You are not accounting for the model training (which can't be ignored, first because you can't ignore fixed costs, and second, because we keep training newer models, so amortizing doesn't quite work), rebound effect, the subsidized bot crawling, etc.

I won't comment further on this, this discussion has been rehashed to death anyway and in better ways that I can.

IMHO the better way is to not do meaningless cover images, and this is also true of stock, non-AI generated images (I'm not against art, so if it's your strength, by all means, please do meaningful or nice cover images).

To add to the sibling comment, your CPU is not going to be using 100 W (if it can even reach that!) for more than a few seconds in total during 15 min of typical Photoshop use.