Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
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Not AI, and not upscaling. Whenever we look at something in real time, what we can see is limited by how much light can get to our retinas and hence to our brains. We can control this a little bit, through dilation of pupils, but the effect is limited. Similarly, we can't make our brains more light-sensitive than they already are, as we're optimized for normal daytime viewing. A camera doesn't have this limitation. SLRs can use aperture and shutter speed to make things more or less visible than they are in the real world, but phones aren't sophisticated enough for this. What phones (and SLRs as well) can do is make the digital sensor more sensitive by cranking up the ISO settings. Most photographers try to shoot with low ISO settings because cranking these will result in digital noise, but people shooting with their phones aren't this picky. If you're shooting at night, most automatic settings will crank the ISO to something most amateur photographers would consider ungodly. While this does have some effect on image quality, it also means that the camera can see more than your eyes can. The same effect could be achieved on color film by taking a long exposure, though this may cause star trails or other (potentially) unwanted artifacts. Most (all?) of those cool space photos of nebulae and other deep field objects aren't anything you'd be able to see with the naked eye, but are achieved by letting a lot of light in, using software to stack photos, and other camera tricks. This isn't to say that you're being lied to by "enhancements"; everything you're seeing is actually there, our visual systems just aren't equipped to see it in real time.
The film analog of ISO is actually ISO. Films come with different sizes of silver halide crystal grains. Bigger grains collect light faster and are therefore more sensitive, at the cost of having your photo be grainier. The biological analog would be if we could increase the size of our rods and cones at will to gather more light per cell.
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