This “guessing” is nice for the sake of artistry, but we’ve got to be careful when knowing what actually was there is important—like when photos are submitted as evidence in court cases, or when determining the identity of a person from a photo as part of an investigation.
I hope such photos are submitted as camera takes them. With our without this new feature, photoshopping a photo before presenting it to court must be illegal.
If you consider photos taken by cell phones, it's hard to really say what "as the camera takes them" means - a lot of ML-driven retouching happens "automagically" with most modern cell phones already and I'd expect more in the future.
It goes even further than that. Image sensors don't capture images. They record electricity that can be interpreted as an image.
This might seem like a quibble, but once you dive a little deeper into it, you realise that there's enormous latitude and subjectivity in the way you do that interpretation.
What's even crazier is that this didn't come with digital photography. Analogue film photography has the same problem. The silver on the film doesn't become an image until it's interpreted by someone in the darkroom.
There is no such thing as an objective photograph. It's always a subjective interpretation of an ambiguous record.
There is a difference in the degree of subjectivity. In interpreting electricity, it's highly localized, and probably doesn't affect the macro structure of the image.
With ML-enhanced photos, you might have a distanced face that is "enhanced" by the model, to become a face that wasn't there. Or a fingerprint, a birthmark, a mole, etc.
Analog photography you could at least use E-6. Processing was tightly controlled and standardized, and once processed, you had an image.
The nice thing about this was that you could hand the E-6 off to a magazine and end up with a photograph printed in the magazine that was very close to the original film. Any color shifts or changes in contrast you could see just with your eyes. You could drop the film in a scanner and visually confirm that the scan looks identical to the original. (You cannot do this with C-41.)
This was not used for forensic photography, though. The point of using E-6 was for the photographer to make artistic decisions and capture them on film, so they can get back to taking photos. My understanding is that crime scene photography was largely C-41, once it was relatively cheap.
