From the link to the study: > For the human writing process, we looked at humans’ total annual carbon footprints, and then took a subset of that annual footpri

From the link to the study: > For the human writing process, we looked at humans’ total annual carbon footprints, and then took a subset of that annual footprint based on how much time they spent writing. So, they aren't asking "does a human painter use more electricity to do a painting than an AI?" ... they are asking "is it more energy efficient for an AI to do a painting, or for a human to exist for several hours?". That is, it doesn't take into account that the human would exist and have a carbon footprint anyway, even if not employed as an artist. It's devised as if employers created their employees, and seems to speculate about the potential energy saving in exterminating them. > emissions of the computing devices used during the writing process are also considered And their graphs show this as exceeding AI emission by a lot (due to AI being quick). This is a fair point, but they only needed this part. They shouldn't have thrown in the person's annual carbon footprint on top of this. Also, traditional art is presumably much less expensive in carbon. And as somebody else pointed out, the use of devices will be part of the carbon footprint data in the first place, so it gets (partly) double-counted.