Fuck AI

Great question! I actually don't really have an official source, it's from my own experience.

I run ComfyUI locally on my own Laptop and generating an image takes 4 seconds, during which my 3070 Laptop GPU uses 80 Watts (the maximum amount of power it can use). It also fully uses one of the 16 threads of my i7-11800H (TDP of 45W). Let's overestimate a bit and say it uses 100% of the CPU (even though in reality it's only 6.25%), which adds 45 watts resulting in 125 watts (or 83 watts if you account for the fact that it only uses one thread).

That's 125 watts for 4 seconds for one image, or about 0.139 WH (0.000139KWH). That would be 7200 images per KWH. Playing one hour of Cyberpunk on a PS5 would be equivalent to me generating 1440 images on my laptop

"Sources":

Oh I forgot to add a disclaimer kinda. I use a model based on SD1.5, which is best for generating new images at 768x512 pixels. Upscaling it to 1536x1024 using AI would take about 4 times as long and thus use 4 times as much energy, but you would only upscale an image after having generated many images and getting one you are satisfied with, so I don't think it makes that big of a difference. Maybe out of 100 pictures I'd upscale one to share it. Though I mostly do AI image generation because I think the technology is really cool. I love toying around with the node system in ComfyUI.