There’s actually quite a few models that can run easily on a mid-range gaming computer (yes even for image generation, and yes they can run reasonably well) which…that same energy would probably be consumed by gaming so not really a huge difference.

Microsoft even just released an open weights LLM that runs entirely on CPU that is comparable to the big hosted ones people are paying for

Edit: just saw what community I’m in, so my comment was probably not appropriate for the community