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.
alt Hacker News
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.