The model has to be trained, refined, etc. You running it off grid isn’t the entire process, but I agree with you in a different sense.
If not AI, then there would be some other kind of compute taking up server capacity. It’s on the data centers to solve this one, not AI.
Training a model isn’t free. It takes money and compute. That’s also the greenhouse emissions. Even if you don’t pay for any model and run it locally using solar, you’ve still got to consider what came before.