here’s also the energy it needs to fulfill requests once implemented

Just like everyone playing the 3d game once its finished development and sold. A few hours of gaming or a few hours of making AI slop photos is the same watts. No one notices the energy when its spread across millions of homes as compared to centralized at a data center. A few years ago Nvidia, Microsoft and others were pushing gaming as a streaming service (The games were being run remotely and your keyboard/gamepad was transmitted to their servers, then the video was streamed back). Those used massive data centers. Yet no one was screaming to stop gaming.