The "Chinese room" argument, so far as I understand it, applies to any discreet computation process simulating consciousness.
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".
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".