Most pictures are postprocessed automatically nowadays. Beauty filters, pixel binding, HDR..
Multiple layers and filters which distort 'reality'.
And I think you are being romantic by trying to preserve a form of originality, while technology itself has never done anything else than alter our perception of the world.
As an example: There's a good reason why many kids might have thought that grandpa's reality looked black and white back then haha
How much something resembles reality in this case is subjective.
Some might even argue the AI footage looks closer to the truth than the original file.