The limitations of text to image are not technological, they arise from the inherent impossibility of encoding visual information precisely using words alone.

If you tried to generate a self portrait using an AI by inputting only a text prompt description of your face it would not result in a recognisable picture of you- only a generic image of someone perhaps similar to you. And this would hold true no matter how skilled you may become in writing prompts and no matter advanced the language model used by the AI to interpret your prompts.

So text to image is never going to be anywhere near as precise as drawing tablet when it comes to the editing of digital images.

To be clear I did not say that AI art would be seen as having low quality, I said it would come to be seen as having low value- a subtle but important distinction.

For example an author recently posted a question about how he could avoid being 'ripped off' by an AI Artist. His problem-as he saw it- was that he might be charged a high fee for something that took only minutes to produce by someone who pretended to have done the work themselves without using AI.

This- he seemed to feel- would be to steal from him by pretending to offer something of high value while in reality supplying something of lower value.

But the fascinating aspect of this situation was that the quality of the image was not at issue- in fact the very root of his problem was that he would not be able to tell by looking at the image how it had been made.

What this tells us is that AI Art will be seen as having low value not because it's bad art, but because it's so very quick and easy to make. Humans tend not to place a high value on anything seen as quick and easy to make.

No improvement in the quality of AI Art will prevent it's being seen as cheap low value Art when compared with art made by humans. How this perception will impact on the marketplace is another question. In some contexts such as greeting cards, for example, people will not care how the art was made- they just want a pretty picture.

However, if you are selling a product where the Art it contains is seen as a measure of the quality of the product, and you use low value AI Art in that product, this could be a problem because the message it sends is that you don't care enough about your product- and by extension- your customers, to pay out for higher value art made by humans.

None of this is especially rational of course- but humans are not entirely rational beings. One might say to that worried Author 'why do you care if the Art took only two minutes to make- if you like the Art and had already agreed the price?' And from a purely rational perspective he should not care. But- the fact that he paid a high price for something that took only minutes to make feels to him like stealing- and in a contest between rational thought and feeling, feeling will win out every time when it comes to human beings.

So the Impacts of AI in all it's aspects may not be as expected due to this variable- it may turn out, for example, that the perception of AI Art becomes so negative that it's use in almost any context will become seen as toxic and damaging to any product it is used in. Not saying this will be the case, but it could happen.

So don't be so quick to dismiss your own species in your enthusiasm for it's putative replacement- humans are nothing if not unpredictable.