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.

I agree. I could not be more blown away if a real UFO landed and aliens introduced themselves. A week ago all of this was impossible.

This isn’t true, the quality of images generated by DALL-E are really good, but they are an incremental improvement and based on a long chain of prior work. See e.g. https://github.com/CompVis/latent-diffusion