Always love when self agrandized authorities act like idiots. Feels like the box wine wins wine competition article.
I have a friend that does photo competitions. They say winning is more about knowing the judges than anything else.
Apple implements a good amount of post processing into their camera app, not surprised judges were not able to be 100% certain.
Yup, as does every other smartphone manufacturer. This includes certain processing stages that specifically use AI to (hopefully) enhance the perceived image quality.
So if they dislike that, they should ban all smartphone cameras and probably a lot of post production software.