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Or the guy is just having fun enjoying his hobby.

The photographer is very upfront about the process, too.

Who are they cheating? If they are upfront about the process, hardly the observer, or..?

I'll answer this here.

He is not upfront about it. Most lay people think that these amazing shots he gets are what is attainable with a backyard telescope. It's not.

It's bad for the same reason influencers using body filters is bad.

At some point the photo cameras or mobile phones are going to automatically include such denoising features (since it's an artefact of the photo capture, not a visible element) and then people would still call it "#nofilter"

Erm, that point has come since quite a while.

Recent controversy over fake sony moonshots:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35107601

True, this was a fascinating one :)

*Samsung, though. Not Sony.

Why is it considered cheating? What is it cheating against?

The models are trained on Hubble data. It's cheating against the rest of the astrophotography community if you're just replacing your pixels with NASA's pixels. Mcarthy takes a lot of flack for this and has said he'll back off use of the AI models.