The machine didn’t learn anything, just executed your orders.
Imagine that you sit with your grandma in front of a PC (and let’s assume she’s not a SE). You fire up a terminal, give her the keyboard and dictate every keystroke necessary to write and execute a program (or do any other task for that matter). Does that mean that your grandma just learned programming? I think not. Learning implies being able to find and apply some rules which where not explicitly given.
Of course they want a constant revenue stream. I want a constant revenue stream as well, isn’t it normal?
Whether the price is worth paying for you is a different matter but wanting to profit off your hard and good work is completely natural to me.