My wife was telling me that I was burning a tree every time I made some generative art online, but I couldn't easily debunk this and didn't have time to do experiments.
Well, I finally have a reasonable upper bound on the electric usage.
It takes just under 6 seconds of RTX 3090 time to make a DALL-E 2 quality image using DALL-E Mega. That card draws 350W under load. So it takes around 2,100 J.
That's similar to running a space heater for 1.4 seconds.
@urusan Well, I did expect an answer in the fractions. ;)
@trinsec I don't remember the specifics from when I calculated it earlier (and trees vary a lot), but burning a whole mature tree will put off energy in the many MJ range.