Well, when you use tokens you are using energy. The token doesn't have value in and of itself. But that basically becomes a conversation of "what value does currency have".

In a material sense. Tokens are just a reflection of compute cost. You could have a literal person sitting in a room doing math problems each time you spend a "token". You would be paying for the value of the "computer". That labor has value.

In this sense the tokens are being spent on an extremely inefficient computation to yield text on a screen that may or may not be helpful to the user. But, the cost of that text generation is in the labor to extract oil, to extract minerals and rare earth metals, water infrastructure, electric infrastructure. Even for the labor of the software developers that build the AI systems.

Paying for a token is just paying for that labor value. The token represents that in the same way currency does.

Now, we can all use currency to buy mud pies. Our current economy being built up on mud pies doesn't mean there is no value. Currently we value mud pies. The mud pies might not have actual material use or value. But, currently we are puting tons of labor and resources into building those mud pies. Those resources and labor have value. That's where the tokens cost is derived from; even if the tokens just give us mud pies in return.

You have to actually use it though, and that helps increase the company's imaginary value, and hurts the environment.