the point it how difficult it is for you. the easier the present the less it is valuable. now you backtrack and mention that you have imagination and vision, and you spend effort trying to bring it to life, sure. but the original sentence was to just "ask some GenAI tool to make them a nice picture for their friend's birthday". which of course can be automated with a button.

You interpreted that part to mean "no customization", I meant as a tool for customization.

Value is relative, of course, that's why exchange/trade works, right? And the same applies here too, with the added complications of explicitly "unknowable price", after all I don't know apriori how much value my friend will assign to the card!

In general there are many situations that map closer to your understanding than mine, but I think you are dismissing also a lot of perfectly valid ones where your model simply doesn't apply.

For example if said friend values effort, but "apparent concept vs. actual results fidelity" is not part of effort for them.

Yet still we don't know if they value effort as in time spent (because if they value time spent then it's the same value in both of my scenarios) or if they value some "visible handcraftedness" (effort to produce something that I am known to be very amateur at). And even then the question arises, isn't picking the best tool for the job itself effort?

Of course if this friend simply abbors GenAI shit then they will think it's "low effort" even if I put hours and hours into it (that I wouldn't have put into a traditional image manipulation software, because there I realized soon that I would need months of learning, etc.)