I don't think it's a useful way to frame it. Model training is very compute-intensive. Generation isn't. You can run it on locally on consumer hardware. It's just not very monetizable, so we're converging on a black-box "in the cloud" approach.
If we're focusing on energy consumption, using an LLM to generate a newspaper article probably uses less energy than a living journalist would use. The morning commute alone is probably "worth" a dozen articles.
The problem is different. First, that journalist is still alive and consuming resources, just out of a job. Second, because you now have a very cheap way to generate an infinite number of articles, and there are commercial incentives to do so, the "dead internet theory" has a good chance of coming true.
If we're focusing on energy consumption, using an LLM to generate a newspaper article probably uses less energy than a living journalist would use. The morning commute alone is probably "worth" a dozen articles.
The problem is different. First, that journalist is still alive and consuming resources, just out of a job. Second, because you now have a very cheap way to generate an infinite number of articles, and there are commercial incentives to do so, the "dead internet theory" has a good chance of coming true.