a) That's absolutely not always the case with current tooling, especially professional NN-driven tooling from Adobe and the like.
b) This isn't an ai-generated image-- these tools just create detail where there isn't detail. What it has to add to reconstruct a railing, flat surface, or repeating pattern is a lot more straightforward than trying to reconcstruct a blurry face.
> It's likely that the faces were washed out by the light and the original photographer many years ago 'enhanced' it by scratching some facial features into the developed photographic plate, which was pretty common at the time.
c) Those faces aren't scratched out anything. The shapes are far too organic and unnatural looking. Those forms and misinterpretations of what's there are absolutely AI-generated. I'd bank my retirement on it. I've done this work professionally, and I've been doing photo manipulation for 30 years.