Isn't this overly critical ?. The content matters far more than the image and the chapters are good. I didn't even register the image - I think most folks today have eyes that auto-skip images after being pattern-trained to ignore ads.
"Don't judge a book by its cover" is for people who don't actually read books. You can't necessarily tell when a book is good based on its cover, but you can absolutely tell with a high certainty that a book with a lazy, crappy, low effort cover is probably going to have a similar level of care and attention put to the contents. It's easily at least a 95% hit rate. Is not overly critical to see something presented lazily and assume it will also be lazy inside, and in this kind of field, I'd also expect that if the cover is AI generated, most of the content could easily be as well.
This isn't the first tab I've closed at the first sign of lazy AI usage and it probably won't be the last.
In that case throwing a generated image without touch up shows the lack of care of the author for a work that's not as fleeting as a podcast. It's not that hard to type the correct words and/or a non wobbly font with Paint.NET / Photopea / Gimp / Affinity Photo / Photoshop / <your favorite pixel editor here>. It also shows an usage of AI without supervision which is kind of a red flag.
I used to listen to Michael Kennedy a lot when my day job was Python, and still occasionally do so this may get a pass, but it's still a bad signal in my books.