There is no such thing as a free lunch
The cost did not go anywhere. It moved, and the invoice was deferred, not cancelled.
Every version of this technology was sold to you as something for nothing. Same output, less money, less time, fewer people. An entire industry rearranged itself around the idea that the cost had been removed.
The cost did not go anywhere. It moved. It left the production line, where it was visible and budgeted and somebody's job, and it reappeared on the other side as the thing you now have to spend to be noticed at all. You are not paying a designer anymore. You are paying to escape a flood that you and everybody else are also feeding.
Cheap to make and expensive to be heard is the same bill, arriving from a different direction.
Which is why the people who bought the easy story hardest are the ones in the most trouble. They took the saving up front and are now discovering the invoice was deferred, not cancelled. The math is not subtle. When everyone's cost of production falls toward zero, production stops being the scarce thing, and whatever is scarce is what sets the price. Attention is the scarce thing now, so attention is what costs. That transfer happened quietly, while everybody was busy congratulating themselves on the savings.
There is an esoteric name for the mechanism, if you like your economics with a little mysticism. Vadim Zeland, in Reality Transurfing, describes what he calls excess potential: want a thing badly enough, assign it enough importance, and forces gather to take it away from you. The market wanted effortless output very badly. It is currently being invoiced for the wanting.
You do not have to buy the metaphysics to see the pattern. Every gold rush prices its own shovels. Every shortcut crowds until it is the long way. The only position that survives the cycle is the one that was never premised on the lunch being free: use the machine, pay the human cost of judgment on top, and charge for the difference.