That take is common, but it doesn’t hold up very well when you look at how people actually use AI tools in practice.

1. **Effort isn’t only manual labor**

Creating good AI-generated content still requires effort—just a different kind. You have to:

- Understand exactly what you want to say

- Craft precise prompts (often dozens of iterations)

- Curate, edit, fact-check, and personalize the output

- Combine it with original photography, video, design, or voice

A lazy person just types “make me a viral post” and hits share. Most people who consistently post decent AI-assisted content are putting in real work; it’s just upstream of the final pixels rather than in Photoshop for six hours.

2. **The “real art” gatekeeping is selective**

People have been using tools to reduce manual effort forever and we stopped caring when the results got good:

- Photographers use Lightroom presets and AI culling → still photographers

- Musicians use Auto-Tune, drum samples, and loop packs → still musicians

- Writers use Grammarly, spell-check, and now LLMs for drafts → still writers

Nobody accuses a photographer of “not caring” because they didn’t develop film in a darkroom. The goalposts move once the tool becomes ubiquitous and the output is indistinguishable or superior.

3. **Sometimes AI is the only way some people can express themselves at all**

- Non-native speakers using AI to write fluent captions

- Disabled creators who can’t draw or type fast but have strong ideas

- People with limited time (parents, full-time workers) who still want to share thoughts or memes

Dismissing their posts as “zero effort” ignores that the effort barrier was lowered so they could participate in the first place.

4. **Purely hand-made low-effort slop has always existed**

Phone screenshots, copy-pasted tweets, 5-second TikTok reactions, blurry memes made in MS Paint—tons of popular content was always “zero effort” by traditional craft standards. AI just made the ceiling higher for people who do care, while the floor (lazy garbage) looks shinier now.

Bottom line: judging effort by how much was done without tools is like judging a chef’s skill by how many things they grew in their backyard. The final dish is what matters, and AI is now just another kitchen appliance. Some people use it to microwave trash; others use it to plate Michelin-level ideas they never could have executed manually. You can dislike the aesthetic or the flood of content, but “they don’t care” is usually projection.