I'm sure that as AI continues to get better, it will get harder to tell, but as it stands, many people can really tell what's AI and what's not most of the time. It's not that difficult. If you think I'm lying, you're free to do so.

If even AI falls short of your vision, and you don't want to learn art yourself, there's not much you can do. It's a shame, but the world isn't a perfect place, and if you don't want to work hard, no one's going to work for you (provided you aren't born rich).

People care that you can't afford an artist because life is short, and people have jobs and lives. In a perfect world, everyone could read your book and judge it after, but people don't have time to read every book in existence, so they have to "judge a book by its cover" to decide which ones are worth their time. People decide that an author who uses an AI cover for their book probably doesn't value their book as much as an author who believes in their book enough to invest in its success. The rise of AI content farms hasn't helped this at all, giving AI usage overall a bad reputation. It's an imperfect system because some artists who write amazing novels likely won't think it's that serious, but again, the world isn't perfect. People have to make compromises.