As with so many mistakes Google makes, this is letting the technical people front-run an interaction that should have been spearheaded by the social people.

From a technical standpoint, it's easy to think of AI-based cleanup as in the same category as "improving the compression algorithm" or "improving the throughput to the client": just a technically-mediated improvement. But people have a subjectively-different reaction between decreasing instances of bandwidth-related pixelation and making faces baby-smooth, and anyone on the community side of things could have told the team responsible (if they'd known about it).

Sometimes Google's tech-expert-driven-company approach has negative consequences.