Especially with an ebook, if the content is good, I frankly don’t even care if it even has a cover at all.
That there's a fixed budget of time/money - exactly X hours/dollars will be allocated to the book, one way or another.
That the improvement to the quality of the content as time/money is invested is something approaching linear - that if exactly X hours/dollars are going to be allocated to the book, the content will be appreciably better if, say, 0.9X is allocated to the content vs, say, 0.8X.
That time and money is fungible: that all time/money that could be invested in the content could be invested in superficial things, and the other way around.
As independent developer.
Yes, time is fixed. There is only 24 hours in a day.
For example, if you were to ask a human artist to draw this image with two crabs, and this artist didn't know how many legs crabs have, what would they do? I think they'd probably google how many legs crabs have, and how they look in general, and at the very least draw two crabs with the same amount of legs.
But these generative models don't know how many legs crabs have, and they are not clever enough to ask, or even count it seems. So you end up with results like these. The main crab has 8 legs (6 + 2 claws), while the little one seemingly has 10 (or at least it has 5 on one side), and it's also missing an eye for some reason.
A human artist can also make mistakes, for sure. But i don't think these kind of mistakes would be expected from an artist.
And i agree with the other commenters that said this reflects poorly on the author of the book. Didn't they care to check the cover for obvious mistakes? Attention to detail is a very important trait on a technical writer.