These are important conversations to have because there is so much hyperbole in both directions that a lot of people end up having strong but misguided opinions. I think it's very helpful to consider the impact of LLMs in context (heheh) of the bigger picture rather than in isolation, because suddenly a lot of things fall into perspective.

For instance, all water use by data centers is a fraction of the water used by golf courses! If it really does comes down to the wire for conserving water, I think humanity has the option of foregoing a leisure activity for the relatively wealthy in exchange for accelerated productivity for the rest of the world.

And totally, LLMs might not be able to come up with new ideas, but they can super-charge the humans who do have ideas and want to develop them! An idea that would have taken months to be explored and developed can now be done in days. And given that like the majority of ideas fail, we would be failing that much faster too!

In either case, just eyeballing the numbers we have currently, on average the resources a human without AI assistance would have consumed to conclude an endeavor far outweighs the resources consumed by both that human and an assisting LLM.

I would agree that there will likely be significant problems caused by widespread adoption of AI, but at this point I think they would social (e.g. significant job displacement, even more wealth inequality) rather than environmental.