Is it ethical/correct for DALL-E to charge money?

I feel like the copyright issue is a proxy argument.

What if a very large group of artists, around the level of Disney, created art for the purpose of training and selling their own AI artist? Would DISNEY-E be ethical if 100.0% legal?

I suspect the real debate is the unfair advantage this puts in the hands of a few. Not copyright in the legal sense, but copyright in the labor sense.

Which is a perfectly valid argument, but that brings us to debating relative ethics over the absolute ethics of copyright violation.

Is it ethical for Microsoft to charge for GitHub Copilot, since they didn't pay the programmers who provided the code it was trained on? Is it ethical for Elsevier to charge for scientific papers, since they didn't pay the scientists who wrote or peer reviewed them?

Is it ethical/correct for an art student to study the techniques and copyrighted works of other artists in learning to create their own art? Was the 2nd impressionist painter ethical/correct?

Yes, there's manpower and energy that goes into every image creation. Without a profit incentive the technology would mostly stagnate. So ya it makes sense to charge to keep things rolling.

The original purpose of copyright was to incentivize artists to create more art. The question is, in a post-DALL-E world, is art still incentivized by said laws? Arguably not if any art can just be generated in a fraction of the time it would take to create it by hand.