LLMs are a tool; granted, a tool rushed to market lacking critical guardrails, but a tool in the same vein as Photoshop or the like, which is why the photos look AI-ified. They’ve been heavily edited by the photographer.

Had we been presented the raw pix, would there have been that knee jerk response to assign provenance to AI?

As far as killing “our sense of awe”, what this should do is prompt us to be even more critical of what we see on the web and seek out experiences of our own, rather than looking at someone else’s.