I think most people would in fact prefer an artisanal chair if not for the price, not just "especially" accounting for price. Not a good comparison here though, because most products are not cheaper to the consumer due to AI - only cheaper (in theory) to the provider.

Everything about that analogy is wrong.

Everyone would prefer a nicer handmade chair (if not by the price difference).

Chairs are not comparable to OPs cards; writing on a card costs nothing (but intent, which seems to be in low stock these days).

Finally, factoring in the real operating cost, ongoing capital costs, and environmental/social externalities, the AI chair in your example would cost something like 1000x a handmade chair.

This is so true. My wife loves knitting and frequently gets comments about her items of people asking if they could have her knit something for them. When she tells them that if she tripled the prices of a similar store-bought one, she'd still be making sweatshop wages, they go back to the mass produced version they already have pretty quick.

That one from IKEA was designed by actual people though. If I had a chair designed by robots it probably wouldn’t be as nice, comfortable and evidently, affordable.

There is a distinct difference between a chair and a communication (birthday card, letter, email, whatever) about some personal life event

Everyone prefers an artisanal chair over one from IKEA. The only reason they go for the latter is because that's what they can afford, not because they would get that option if all else were equal.

If you send cards via a third-party subscription service that mails random cards to uploaded contacts in bulk, you'd get marks for setting it up the first time but as the cards pile up and the if the service is detected, it will eventually become a signal that you don't care enough to send them personally.

You're supposed to write an additional message inside the card...

They have enough different cards that at least you know effort was put into choosing the card. Also effort was put into buying the card at a store, signing it (often/hopefully with a short message), and sending it.

I don’t really want to defend Hallmark too much but I’d argue they provide a means of low effort personalisation. You choose a design that reflects you and your relationship to the recipient. You write a personal message inside (hopefully). The alternative is creating a card from scratch which is a big step up in creativity and time requirement.

Perhaps, but you can tell that these cards were made by real people. The art, messages, etc. are all different with varying levels of humor, seriousness, etc. LLMs really seem to converge to specific patterns regardless of the task that are instantly identifiable and low quality. What ends up happening is that the person on the other end thinks “this guy is a moron, he needed a robot to write out a happy birthday card?” Sure getting the hallmark card is mass produced, but they really do hire real artists and writers to make these cards. The robot creates a converged output that is instantly identifiable and has perceived lower quality.

If you don't actually take the time to write something manually inside the card, that's as thoughtless asking an LLM to generate a birthday message to someone.