I would not have guessed that this is a particular post-processing style (I no nothing about photography); my first impression was that some of the pictures wer

I would not have guessed that this is a particular post-processing style (I no nothing about photography); my first impression was that some of the pictures were either AI generated (the general aesthetic is quite common in AI generated pictures), or 3D renders. Are there good explanations for why AI generated pictures tend to emulate this particular post-processing style? Is it a simple matter of choice of training data, or does it have to do with the "unnatural smoothness patterns" of the generated (or in the article's case, post-processed) image? Apart from that, I find it quite surprising that this is the first photoshoot. Isn't U2, first and foremost, a high altitude photography platform? Sure, they probably mostly cared about photographing the surface of the planet, and perhaps the plane's (fixed) equipment was even such that it could only photograph the surface. But did no one pilot, co-pilot, etc. ever care to try and take pictures with even a humble consumer camera in a U2? Finally: could the post-processing style have been chosen on purpose to hide details which are (for whatever reason) still "sensitive information"?