How often do you capture auroras or other beauty shots, vs. readouts on your electricity meter, stickers on the back of your furnace, receipts, and a hundred other displays and documents you need to send someone? I definitely do plenty of the latter, and in such cases, I'd really appreciate the AI to not spice things up with details it thinks should be there.

I'm by no means against the feature. Hell, I shoot 90% of my family photos in Portrait mode on my Galaxy phone, which does some creative bluring and probably some other magic[0]. I just really appreciate being able to turn the magic on or off myself. That, and knowing exactly what the magic is[1].

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[0] - I don't know what exactly it does, but switching from normal to Portrait mode is all it takes for my photos to suddenly look amazing, as judged by my wife, vs. plain sucking.

[1] - See e.g. "scene optimizer" in Galaxy phones. It's a toggle on normal photo mode. I have no first clue what it does, I can't see any obvious immediate difference between shots taken with vs. without that feature.

I recently took a picture of a lizard on a granite with large grains. When I zoomed in to identify the type of lizard I saw that all the grains and some leaves on a tree had been simplified with some type of swirl. I find it unlikely those swirls were artifacts of the sensor itself. My assumption is the effect is related to compression given how often it repeated but I'm not sure.

There are differences of kind here.

The important property is how the pixels are correlated with the physical reality being imaged - because the goal is to reason and learn about the depicted subject though information in the photo. Heuristics and algorithms for demosaicing, white balance, auto-brightness/dynamic range, lens collection, removing motion blur, etc. improve the correlation or improve our ability to see it. This is fine, though you need to be aware at time which properties of the image are to be treated as relative vs. absolute.

This is also a far cry from having your camera think, "I'm a consumer camera! Normies often shoot pictures of the Moon, so this fuzzy circle must be it; let me paste a high-resolution photo of the Moon there", or "gee, normies often shoot sportsball, so this green thing must be astroturf, and this grey blob is probably the ball", etc.

Big difference between a fancy interpolation algorithm that compiles to 500 bytes and another that takes many more orders of magnitude of space because it also contains data used to add details from what it thinks other similar photographs have