That's an interesting point. Retouching a photo after taking it used to be "manipulating reality", frowned upon by "real" photographers. Nowadays, postprocessing digital negatives and adding your own style to it is part of a normal photographer's workflow.

(However, I think the negative feelings don't come from a discussion of "real vs fake" or "classical vs new", but mostly from the point of view that using artwork as training data is stealing. I don't agree with that view, but I think it's at the core of the argument.)