To meaningfully compare directly like this, you'd need to choose two things with similar energy usage/carbon footprint. Sure "the convenience of a house" is greater, but a person's usage of an image-generation model also consumes many orders of magnitude less energy.
For a balanced comparison:
* A full year of LLM usage (5 joules per token[0] * 200 tokens per query * 10 queries per day * 365 days per year = 1.014kWh, which by the US's energy mix[1] is about 0.4kg of CO2)
* A single cup of coffee (about 0.4kg of CO2 according to [2])
With that, I think most pepole would gain considerably more utility from the former.
[0]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2310.03003
(Your numbers would also not be accurate for me. I warm tea in a microwave, so it’s closer to 15 W-hr)
My point is not to claim one value system over another, but to frame the problem in a more appropriate light. I think, even taking your bad-faith stance above, it is still framed as “what adds more to one’s quality of life?”
I would argue most people would weigh the convenience of a house a lot higher. That doesn’t mean AI is a net negative, just that it’s important to frame the problem that focuses on what matters most to people (quality of life).