I don't think it's intentional. This behavior is a straightforward consequence of training something on pairs of "real" and "degraded" images. It learns what images look like and does the best it can. Philosophically, replacing the moon with a better moon is no different than any other computational photography technique that uses world knowledge, like reducing red eye from flash by detecting faces, or enhancing blurry text using knowledge of the alphabet.

The problem is philosophical - people are upset by certain types of enhancement error, but not others, and they can't even articulate the difference to themselves, let alone to an AI.

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pjc50 9 hours ago | parent [-]

> people are upset by certain types of enhancement error, but not others, and they can't even articulate the difference to themselves

People are upset by enhancement errors that produce an image that is meaningfully different from the "true image". Replacing the sun with the moon or replacing the letters with different letters (e.g. https://www.dkriesel.com/en/blog/2013/0802_xerox-workcentres... ).

The philosophical problem here is that you can't get at the true image, you can only imagine ideas like "what the human originally taking the photo saw with their naked eye".

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dTal 9 hours ago | parent [-]

What constitutes a "meaningful" difference? If you replace flash-induced red eyes with a more plausible (yet inaccurate) eye color, people are perfectly happy with that, even though the camera indeed saw red photons. They're not happy if you run the exact same algorithm on a photo of someone with genuinely red eyes. It's not always about the "true photons" - the cause of the red eye is relevant, and so is the intent of taking the photo.

"what the human originally taking the photo saw with their naked eye" is a tempting standard, but a misleading one - there might not be a human eye near the camera at all, and at any rate there certainly isn't one co-located with the focal point. And shall we have cameras that render only a few degrees of high resolution color, and have a large-ish blind spot? It's what the human eye sees.

	▲	mcphage 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> What constitutes a "meaningful" difference? Well, replacing the sun with the moon constitutes a meaningful difference. Let’s start there and work our way down.