It’s the combination, to be honest. An AI meme once in a while is fine. Jeans-ifying stuff for a meme (without using AI) is also fine, because it generally takes at least a tiny bit of effort to make beyond “type something into a chatGPT prompt”. We’re getting spammed by the same fucking AI- generated meme constantly.
Make a different /c/ for AI-generated shitposting. Hell, make a jeansposting /c/. But flooding /c/lemmyshitposting with one meme that’s almost always AI-generated makes people unsub from the community… so yes, the pervasiveness of the meme is actually killing the community.