40,000,000,000 watts

This doesn't add up though. Fortnite's player base is only about 10% PC, and the system requirements are pretty modest. It'll even run on Intel integrated graphics, according to the minimum requirements from Epic.

There's even a modest chunk (~6%) on Nintendo switch, which, according to Nintendo, draws about 7 watts when playing a game in TV mode.

it wouldn’t be pushed on us

The Internet was pushed on everyone.

Sure companies were excited to promote it, but it was primarily adopted because of a very large amount of people being excited about it.

how can it be trusted without human verification

You use Google despite no human verification. Yahoo used to function based on human curated lists.

I use DuckDuckGo to find sources, not answers. I won’t use them again if they’re trash. They’re accountable for their content.

Human curated lists are still very helpful. In a sense, that was the value of Reddit.

environmental impact

I did the math and posted it on Lemmy.

I’ll take your word for it.

Sounds like you forgot to consider the energy cost of developing each AI model. Developing and maintaining a model is vastly more energy intense than 3d game dev. Keep in mind that you can ship a 3d game and ramp down gpu use for dev. But an AI model has to be constantly updated, mostly by completely retraining. Also, noone was clamoring to build massive data centers just to develope one game. Yet they are for one model.

The Internet was 30 years old by the time AOL was sending CDs (even floppies) to people.

The Internet was pushed on everyone. AOL and all other ISPs would mail CDs to everyone completely unsolicited. You’d buy a new PC and there would be a link to AOL on the desktop.

Are you 15? If so, you might read this and believe the above is true. Those of us elderly folks who lived through the 80s and 90s laugh at this AI shill propaganda.

They "would mail CDs to everyone completely unsolicited" - yeah, that was called advertising, because there was huge consumer demand and a race to be the company to meet that demand. AOL sent CDs (incredibly inexpensive to manufacture) as advertising hoping consumers would choose AOL instead of the competition, by making AOL the easiest choice - consumers already had the required software (software distribution was a challenge in this time before internet was ubiquitous).

The dot com boom was not the claim of a new technology being pushed onto consumers, the dot com boom was the opposite - a new technology existed and consumers were embracing it, and many companies speculated on how to gain ownership of markets as they shifted online. (The following bust was fueled by over-ambitious speculation on scales and timeframes.)

Anyway, AOL mailing CDs was late in the era, it was much better when they were mailing floppy disks we could reuse.