This is already a question in astronomy. At least in astrophotography (think Instagram accounts or computer backgrounds) there are virtually no images that don't involve combining individual frames and programmatically combining the best x% to enhance the image (increase saturation, sharpness, etc.) and sometimes color is artificially added in.
Seems like whats missed in this is a lot of people not understanding that "regular" pictures of the moon from astrophotographers/ NASA are actually big composites of multiple images that have gone through pretty intense processing - next to none of it is done with single-frame data, and the fact phones can mimic this at any level is pretty neat imo.
the difference is that these processes, i.e. stacking multiple images, are meant to find out as much signal as possible from a noisy set and if they bring extra signal they are all declared in the sources.
It’s worth pointing out that there can be a distinction between the type of information in signals and the type of information in filters. I think people feel disturbed because they think the filters here are overfitted, therefore are just parroting out memorized patterns of the moon. But if it were a filter that generalized to everything, people would just say “wow the camera sensor is amazing”.
The irony is that the backlash here will just guarantee that they put more effort into making this generalize better, so it’s received as less gimmicky. Whether that’s just putting an enhancement neural network in optical form at the ccd level or something else is anyone’s guess. People say they don’t want detail that’s not there, but to some extent the amount of detail is always being infused with assumptions and heuristics at every level of the imaging pipeline.
Seems like whats missed in this is a lot of people not understanding that "regular" pictures of the moon from astrophotographers/ NASA are actually big composites of multiple images that have gone through pretty intense processing - next to none of it is done with single-frame data, and the fact phones can mimic this at any level is pretty neat imo.