This problem is not new. In 2019, Huawei introduced a special image processing feature in its smartphone camera app, the "Moon Mode" (opt-in). Missing details are added to the moon photos via machine learning inference from a pre-trained model. Huawei then started marketing these processed images as a showcase of its new smartphone's photography performance. In China, it was widely criticized by tech reviewers [1][2] as misleading, and "Moon Mode" became a running gag among tech enthusiasts for a while.

It seems that Samsung simply adopted the same tactic to compete...

On the Huawei "Moon Mode" controversy, one can even find a research paper [3] published in a peer-reviewed social studies (!) journal, Media, Culture & Society:

> This is where the controversy began: Chinese tech critic Wang’s (2019) posting on Weibo, the Chinese equivalent of Twitter, made quite a splash. In his post, Wang put forward a shocking argument: he said that Huawei’s Moon Mode actually photoshops moon images. He contended that, based on his self-conducted experiments, the system ‘paints in pre-existing imagery’ onto photographed takes, re-constructing details that are not captured in the original shots. Huawei immediately refuted these claims, stressing that the Moon Mode system ‘operates on the same principle as other Master AI modes that recognize and optimize details within an image to help individuals take better photo'

[1] https://www.androidauthority.com/huawei-p30-pro-moon-mode-co...

[2] https://www.phonearena.com/news/Is-the-Moon-Mode-on-the-Huaw...

[3] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/01634437211064...