Are we not conscious?
It turns out that when one looks at the argument in detail, and in particular at Searle’s responses to various objections (such as the Systems and Virtual Mind replies), it is clear that he is essentially begging the question, and his ultimate argument, “a model is not the thing modeled”, is a non-sequitur.
It's a sound argument to the extent that qualia clearly exist, but no one has any idea what they are, and even less of an idea how to (dis)prove that they exist in external entities.
It's the materialists who are begging the question, because their approach to qualia is "Well obviously qualia are something that just happens and so what?"
Unfortunately arguments based on "Well obviously..." have a habit of being embarrassingly unscientific.
And besides - written language skills are a poor indicator of human sentience. Human sentience relies at least much on empathy; emotional reading of body language, expression, and linguistic subtexts; shared introspection; awareness of social relationships and behavioural codes; contextual cues from the physical and social environment which define and illuminate relationships; and all kinds of other skills which humans perform effortlessly and machines... don't.
Turing Tests and game AI are fundamentally a nerd's view of human intelligence and interaction. They're so impoverished they're not remotely plausible.
So as long as DALL-E has no obvious qualia, it cannot be described as sentient. It has no introspection and no emotional responses, no subjective internal state (as opposed to mechanical objective state), and no way to communicate that state even if it existed.
And it also has no clue about 3D geometry. It doesn't know what a sphere, only what sphere-like shading looks like. Generally it knows the texture of everything and the geometry of nothing.
Essentially it's a style transfer engine connected to an image search system which performs keyword searches and smushes them together - a nice enough thing, but still light years from AGI, never mind sentience.
Even if it were about qualia, calling the argument sound “to the extent that” we don’t know enough to tell whether its premises are correct would be a misuse of ‘sound’ and a rather blatant case of burden-shifting - effectively saying “so prove me wrong!” to skeptics.
Materialists can and do make question-begging claims, but that does not somehow cancel out Searle’s own question-begging (furthermore, somewhat ironically, Searle describes himself as a materialist!)
The soundness of the argument cannot be established by showing that current technology is far from being strong AI, as the argument claims much more than just that - it claims it to be impossible in principle. Anyone making such a claim has assumed a heavy burden that demands stronger arguments than you are making here.
Have you ever used a map?
If not, I'd like you to get one and I want you to point out your home in every one. Can you use a magnifying glass, then look at the map hard enough to see yourself looking over a tinier map? Ad infinitum?
That is what Searle means. A map is a model of the world. The model of a world that is a map is not, in fact, in any way equivalent to or interchangeable with the thing it models. It is merely a distilled representation that provides a facsimile representative enough to be useful. So to would be any attempt at modeling consciousness.
If the argument you present here could be so easily generalized, it would work just as well for “proving” that a computer model of an Enigma cypher machine cannot encipher text.
The Chinese Room and the brain of a Chinese-speaking person are completely different physical processes. Looked at on an atomic level, they have almost nothing in common. Mind-body dualists may or may not agree that the room is not "conscious" in the way a human is, but if consciousness is purely a material process, I can't see how the materialist can possibly conclude all the relevant properties of the completely dissimilar room and person are the same.
Those that would argue the Chinese Room is "conscious" in the same way as the Chinese person are essentially arguing that the dissimilarity of the physical processes is irrelevant: the "consciousness" of the Chinese person doesn't arise from molecules bouncing around their brain in very specific ways, but exists at some higher level of abstraction shared with the constituent molecules of pieces of paper with instructions written in English and outputs written in Chinese.
The idea our consciousness exists in some abstract sense which transcends the physics of the brain is not a new one of course. Historically we called such abstractions souls...
What if there's just no way to build consciousness from the building blocks that are within our reach?
Of course parts of regular computers involve "quantum stuff", like details of how transistors and hard drives work, but that doesn't mean they're magic.
The argument of the article is that DALL-E doesn't respond appropriately to a particular kind of input - two entities in some kind of spatial relationship (that it hasn't often seen). Dall-E's not extrapolating the three-D world but stretching a bunch 2-D images together with some heuristics. That works to create a lot of plausible images sure but it implies to this ability might not, say, be able to be useful for the manipulation of 3-D space.
So, given a "Chinese room" is just a computation, it's plausible that some Chinese room could handle 3-d image manipulation more effectively than this particular program.
Which is to say, "no, the criticism isn't this is a Chinese room, that is irrelevant".