This is evidently not the whole story with regards to AI energy usage - training costs, data center buildout costs and the ongoing fierce competition between the providers all add up to a very significant carbon footprint for the AI industry as a whole.

Yes but movie making is also energy intensive - people, sets, cameras, shooting, rendering, editing, etc.

AI should still produce a lot more carbon but AI is suppose to help humanity advance faster and make humanity more productive. Movies and shows are mostly entertainment. So the extra carbon footprint should be worth it.

Even in terms of other computing I think LLMs are a bit of a whipping boy. Do we really need to be gaming in 4K at 120fps with better graphics every year? The game would be just as fun and use much less energy if it looked like Halo 1 (especially when multiplied by however many hundreds of millions of people) but it's treated as a sin to use those same GPUs to make text instead.