Maybe it's sarcasm, but the author seems to downplay these images. Are we really that jaded? This seems like criticizing a dog that learned to speak only basic english...the fact that any of this is even possible is stunning.
Imagine telling someone in 2002 that they can write a description of a dog on their computer, send it over the internet and a server on the other side will return a novel, generated, near-perfect picture of that dog! Oh - sorry, one caveat, the legs might be a little long!
edit: fixed typo
The thing is that current has been producing more and more things that stay at the talking dog level (as well as other definitely useful things, yes). So the impressiveness and the limits are both worth mentioning.
Reminds me of the notorious Dropbox comment, or even the iPod one on Slashdot.
I agree these pictures are amazing and any nitpicking is distracting from the actual impressiveness.
The only real problem with them is that they are conceptually simple. It's always just a subject in the center, a setting and some modifiers. It's doesn't produce complex Renaissance paintings with dozens of characters or a graphic novel telling a story. But that seems more an issue of the short text descriptions it gets, than a fundamental limit in the AI.
As for the AI-typical image artifacts, I don't see that as an issue. Think of it like upscaling an image. If you upscale it too much, you'll see the pixels. In this case you see the AI struggling to produce the necessary level of detail. Scale the image down a bit an all the artifacts go away. It's really no different then taking a real painting done by a human and getting close enough to see the brush strokes. The illusion will fall apart just the same.
<side eye>